


Laugh, I Almost Died

by sinaddict



Category: Profiler
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-24
Updated: 2005-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-08 22:34:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/80193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinaddict/pseuds/sinaddict
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Frannie had run away after her talk with John instead of shooting Bailey?  AU from mid-Venom II (the first season finale).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I've been traveling, but I don't know where.

Melissa's a waitress from South Grandeville, Oklahoma, doing the whole road trip thing since she can't afford to go to college. Not that she knows what she'd do at college, anyway -- she's just having a little trouble with the whole idea of being a grown-up.

Caren with a 'C' is a California girl who wants to see the world, but keeps ending up in truckstop diners along I-5 since she wasted her Europe money on a Prada handbag and a pair of Dolce jeans to fit in with her friends.

Rio's a stripper. Alexa's a wannabe poet. Kathryn's a cheerleader.

Frannie Malone? Well, who the hell cares? She's just a runaway from Atlanta.

Tonight, she's Delaney Kyle, intellectual UC Berkeley student with eye on an English degree and a fondness for pretentious poetry about sexual identity. She's in a quiet bookstore-slash-coffeehouse, listening to said poetry and sipping espresso, occasionally jotting down notes in her leather-bound journal. It would have been more in-character to be jotting down her own attempts at poetry, but her notes are more along the lines of, 'Wow, it's hard not to laugh at this guy!' and 'How very emo and melancholy.'

She loves it.

"Oh, thank Christ! Dee!" a decidedly emo and melancholy college boy drops himself in the chair on the other side of her small table, slouching forward. "Lit term papers?"

"How many pages, what's the subject, and when's it due?" she sips her espresso, dropping her pen. If there's one thing all her characters are good at, it's making cash in dubiously legal ways that the IRS never finds out about.

"Ten page minimum, symbolism and metaphor in Beowulf, two days."

"It's nice that you plan this far ahead," she rolls her eyes sarcastically and tilts her head, studying him. Expensive clothes, twenty-dollar eyeliner, and a designer haircut. "Two-fifty."

His eyes widen and he momentarily forgets his emo persona. "You gotta be kidding me!"

"You want ten pages on symbolism for a work I haven't read since my high school AP British Lit class in forty-eight hours," she smirks at him, pausing for scattered applause from the audience at the last round of bad poetry. "Two-fifty gets you a B, B+ level paper."

"For two-fifty, I should be getting an A."

"Have you gotten an A on any of your previous papers?"

"No."

"I give you an A paper, your professor will suspect plagiarism. Then you'll fail, get put on academic probation, and have to retake the class, under extreme scrutiny, I might add," she sips her espresso calmly and lifts her pen. Nobody could accuse Delaney Kyle of not knowing her stuff. "Two-fifty for a B. Half right now, half when I deliver the paper."

The fact that the kid carries over a hundred dollars in cash proves that she hasn't lost her touch in sizing up her marks. "Wednesday morning," he slides six crisp twenties across the table. "The library."

"Wednesday morning," she agrees, pocketing the money with a sly grin. So, she lied a bit. Her high school AP class was only a year earlier and it'll take her all of four hours to write the paper. Ah, mid-terms at UC Berkeley, she muses as she slips the journal into her purse. She's made three grand this week alone off students who'd rather pay exorbitant amounts of money than do their own research and writing.

She kind of loves being Delaney Kyle.

  
*

  
She loves being Delaney Kyle enough to rent a house for a month.

As houses go, it's a fairly nice one in a decent neighborhood crowded with students, but it's all hers and she can come and go whenever she pleases. (A novel concept, but she really enjoys it.) It came furnished, decorated by an interior design student who was trying to buff up her portfolio, and Frannie thinks it's exactly Delaney's taste.

Quiet, intelligent, and just this side of pretentious.

All in all, she thinks it's a nice place to be spending her eighteenth birthday.

Delaney's twenty. Melissa and Caren with a 'C' are nineteen. Rio's twenty-two.

Frannie Malone is the only eighteen year old. She learned early on that most people think eighteen is some magic number that will automatically transform a child into an adult. The further past eighteen she pretends to be, the more seriously she's taken. Of course, there are times she doesn't want to be taken seriously, when she needs people to underestimate her, and she can play that role to perfection.

Funny thing, though? Frannie Malone hasn't been a child in a _long_ time.

She's just finishing up the Beowulf paper when her current pay-as-you-go cell phone rings. Delaney is reachable in any number of ways, from phone to email to complex message system via waitresses at most of the student-frequented coffeehouses. Most people still go for the phone, though.

Berkeley is her new favorite place to be.

"Happy birthday!" the voice on the other end of the line cheers, humming the birthday song for a few notes before moving on. "So, how does it feel to be eighteen?"

"Right now, I'm twenty," she replies with a wry grin. "How's it going, Ree?"

Aggravated silence. "My name," her sister says precisely. "Is Arianna."

And Frannie can't restrain the chuckle. "Yeah, okay. You could've been stuck with grandma's name, you know. I took a bullet for you there. The least you can do is let me cling to childish memories."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," the eye roll is practically audible. "So, who are you this week?"

"Delaney Kyle." She changes her inflection, her speaking patterns just slightly for each new character, and she slips into them without actually thinking about it. "I'm at Berkeley helping a new wave of freshman make it to their sophomore year."

"Delivering test copies?"

"Term papers."

"Test copies would be easier, you know."

"You are so _my_ sister, aren't you?" Frannie laughs and rifles through her cabinets for the bag of cookies she bought last week. "What's going on with you? Anything new?"

"A guy at school asked me out, I'm failing English, and I'm acing math." And yeah, that was pretty standard for the little sister who'd been doing Frannie's math homework at nine. Then, as an afterthought, "Oh, and Bailey's been trying to get me to talk to him again lately."

Frannie drops the search for cookies instantly. "About what?"

"What else?" Arianna snorts. "You. He wants to know about your friends here, what kind of things you did, where you might be. If I've heard from you lately."

"What do you say?"

"You were friends with any guy who came up to you on your usual street corner with five bucks, and the last time I heard from you, you were madly in love with a Columbian drug runner who knocked you up and was going to whisk you away to Bogotá for the wedding. The entire Mexican mafia was invited, so you should be getting some pretty nice gifts."

Frannie can't stop laughing at that. It's just so Ree. "What did Mom say?"

Arianna affects their mother's voice in an imitation so perfect, it's almost scary. "See? It's like I had Frances I and Frances II. They wouldn't be like this if you hadn't abandoned them for your fucking job!" Dropping the voice, Arianna continues, "Then it devolved into the standard fighting, so I left them a note that said I was going to look for a drug runner of my very own, and if I wasn't home by midnight, my registry would be available at Target."

"Oh, Ree, I love you."

"I love you, too," Arianna replies quietly. "I miss you."

"I miss you, too, kiddo," Frannie sighs. "I'll call you in a few days to check in."

"Okay," Arianna agrees, somewhat subdued. Then, "Hey, what do you charge for an eighth grade book report?"

  
*

  
Wednesday morning, she delivers three term papers to anxious students and idly reads Nietzsche with almost five hundred dollars in her purse. There's something about carrying so much cash that makes her nervous, but she's still just paranoid enough to not want her name on any bank accounts that could be traced, especially since her father is apparently looking for her again.

She doesn't think he could do anything now that she's eighteen, but why push her luck?

Philosophy is not her thing. After twenty minutes, she's ready to give up and hunt for some Dante or Milton instead, when a vaguely familiar voice asks, "Excuse me, are you Delaney Kyle?"

Just _barely_ resisting the urge to say it depends on who's asking (that's Frannie, not Delaney), she closes the book and starts to turn around. "Yes, I am. What can I do for--"

And her voice stops working when she gets a look at who's asking.

It's not much consolation that John Grant looks just as utterly fucking stunned to see her as she is to see him. He's about a half-second slower, though, and she's halfway through the math and science aisles on her way to the door before he catches up to her. "Frances!"

She tries the old ignoring method, but he grabs her arm, whirling her around to face him, and she shoves at him wildly with absolutely no success. "Let go of me," she hisses as quietly as she can, pure habit from spending so much time in libraries lately. Then she thinks it through, and threatens, "Let go of me or I'll scream."

Yeah, she didn't really expect that to work, so she's not too surprised that he just looks at her. "What the hell were you thinking running away like that? Do you have any idea how worried your father is?"

And yes, that's exactly the quickest way to piss her off at the moment.

Her laugh is bitter and a little hysterical even to her, and she does _not_ want to be dealing with this right now. She doesn't want to be dealing with this _ever_, actually. "Oh, _now_ he's worried?" she shakes her head and jerks her arm out of John's grasp. "Please. He was going to ship me off to boarding school, anyway. This way he got rid of me and even saved some money doing it."

John looks at her like she's three steps from completely insane. "He was trying to help you."

There are a thousand remarks she could throw back at that little piece of fiction, but every single one would reveal far too much of Frannie Malone considering John will report every fucking word back to her father like the drone he is. "If that's what helps you sleep at night," she tosses off carelessly and turns her back to him.

He grabs her arm again, and she wonders if he knows he's doing it hard enough to leave a bruise. "Bailey is worried about you," he reiterates, and it suddenly dawns on her that he's not saying it because he thinks she's dumb enough to need the repetition to understand; he thinks he's going to drag her back to face her father whether she likes it or not.

Delaney melts away from her slowly, like pulling gum off her shoe. It's Delaney's speech, Delaney's inflection, but Frannie's words and Frannie's talent for cutting the deepest. "I'm going to say this once," her voice is ice and steel, a character she hasn't played since she was fourteen, a character she never bothered to name since she hated playing her. "I am eighteen years old. There's not a state in this country that can make me ever speak to my so-called father again if I don't want to. Let. Me. Go."

John's just as stubborn and determined as she is, though. "No."

Well, _fuck_.

  
*

  
The coffeehouse is one of hers. The waitresses know her, people smile, nod, wave at her when they see her.

It should make her feel more comfortable, but there's not much of a chance of that with one of her father's lackeys sitting across the table from her. At least she knows for sure he hasn't gotten in touch with dear old dad -- she's been with him every second since he saw her.

She dumps a sugar packet in her coffee. Stirs. Dumps another packet in. Stirs again.

Refuses to be the one to break first, and John apparently doesn't have the same patience. "What the hell were you thinking?"

"Excuse me?"

"Do you have any idea of the statistical probabilities, what happens to runaways? Girls on the street, Frances," he shakes his head, raking a hand through his hair, and she's just stupid enough to admire how good-looking he is. (Thankfully, she's not stupid enough to do anything more than admire.) His earnest cop who wants to help routine is still a good act, but this time she knows better than to fall for it. He says quietly, "You're lucky you're alive."

"Oh, please," she rolls her eyes. His gaze snaps to hers, clearly surprised. "How dumb do you think I am? I fell for that once, but I never make the same mistake twice."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Your 'I just want to help you' act," she clarifies, allowing herself a character break to light a cigarette. Delaney doesn't smoke, but she figures since Delaney's not the one having this conversation, it's okay. Taking a long drag, she exhales slowly and tells him, "Don't try to con a con. It never works."

She wonders if he knows that his eyes darken a few shades when he's angry. "You are something else."

"Well, thanks," she gives him a bright, clearly fake smile. "I do try."

When his cell phone rings and he turns to the side to answer it, she takes the instant of distraction as an opportunity and ditches him, going out the back exit and asking the first student she recognizes for a lift back to the house she's renting.

By noon, Delaney Kyle ceases to exist and Melissa Clarke is on a bus to San Diego.

  
*

  
Bobby LeDeux sweeps her off her feet, literally, the instant she's off the bus, twirling her around in his arms until she's laughing and squealing. "Good to see you, Doll," he kisses her forehead as he sets her back on her feet, sliding an arm around her waist and guiding her into the terminal. "Who are you this week?"

And he's totally serious, not mocking her in the least. She _loves_ him.

"Haven't decided yet," she sighs as she follows him to the baggage claim and waits for him to pick up the three suitcases that her life has boiled down to in the last year. "Melissa at the moment, but I'm waitressed out and I don't want to fuck with an accent right now."

He glances at his watch. "Two whole minutes before you managed to slip 'fuck' into a conversation."

"Is that better or worse than my average?"

"How the fuck should I know?"

She laughs at the sly smile on his face and playfully hits his arm as she follows him out toward his car, resisting the adolescent urge to skip or dance or something equally smacking of teenage giddiness. "You're such a bad influence."

"Yeah, guess your mom was right about me."

"Okay, there are some things I don't ever want to think about again. You dating my mom is one of them."

"Believe me, it's not on my list, either," he rolls his eyes and hefts her suitcases into his trunk with an exaggerated shudder. "But I did get you out of the deal, so I'm ahead."

She finds herself smiling at him as they climb into the car, and he waits for her to buckle her seatbelt before starting the ignition, a little thing he probably doesn't even notice he does that just makes her more grateful for him.

The engine turns over and 'I'm Too Sexy' blasts from the stereo.

"I have _no_ idea," he says very calmly, "who was listening to that."

And she bursts into giggles, knowing full well he'd probably orchestrated that just to make her laugh.

"God, I missed you," she shakes her head, grinning at him.

He grins right back. "Missed you too, sweetheart."

  
*

  
She's sitting at the coffee table at two in the morning, eating Cheetos and drinking Raspberry Vox, and it's nostalgia at its best. (Granted, the first time they did this it was Doritos and Watermelon Smirnoff, but they've matured. Or, at least their taste in vodka has.) "Just think," she tells Bobby over the mass of cards at the center of the table. "You and me. Road trip. Fifty states in... well, some amount of days. I haven't figured it out, yet."

"I always wanted to see that president thing in North Dakota," he agrees. "Got any fours?"

"Mount Rushmore is in South Dakota, isn't it?" she asks as she hands over her only four. "Tens?"

He hands over one, and she keeps her poker face in check. She only needs one more. "Eh, does it matter? They should just end the war and make it one big Dakota. Sixes?"

"I don't think there ever was a war or one Dakota," she laughs. "Go fish."

He does, immediately wincing. "Damn."

"See, this is why I don't let you play poker anymore."

The expression on his face says clearly, 'Funny, smartass,' and she just laughs at him. "For the record," he tells her with mock-seriousness, lifting his glass, "I refuse to play poker with you, not the other way around."

"Because I took you for a hundred-fifty bucks the first time we played, before I had pity on you and let you win a couple rounds," she smirks at him, drinking her vodka as she analyzes her cards. "Seriously, Bobby, you're terrible at poker."

"When you can hustle pool, you can make cracks," he rolls his eyes. "You're the shittiest pool player ever."

"Then it's settled. On our road trip, you hustle pool and I'll take the poker tables," she snags his glass and heads for the bar to make more raspberry martinis. "We'll be like Bonnie and Clyde, except without the getting caught. Or, you know, the violence."

"Right, because getting caught is definitely what you want to avoid more there," he teases her and throws his cards down on the table, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head. "So, are you gonna tell me what scared you enough to make you ditch Berkeley two weeks before you planned to leave?"

"One of my dad's guys found me. Really pisses me off, I mean, I _liked_ being Delaney--" And she stops short because it _really_ occurs to her for the first time that John hadn't been in that library looking for Frannie Malone, he'd been looking for Delaney Kyle. "Fuck me."

"What?"

"He wasn't looking for me. He was looking for Delaney," she sets the vodka bottle down and looks at Bobby, mentally running through possibilities and coming up empty. "Why the fuck would the FBI be looking for Delaney Kyle?"


	2. I've been missing you, but you just don't care.

John Grant hates the Bay Area.

The weather's shit, he can't find a decent burger joint, and he distrusts witnesses who don't notice mimes on street corners anymore on principle. The VCTF usually doesn't get called in on single homicides unless they show signs of being possible serial killer victims. This one, though. This one is one of the most brutal murders he's seen recently, and that says something.

The victim's female aged sixteen to twenty-two, according to Grace, and that victim profile alone is enough to make Bailey difficult to deal with. This victim also has shoulder-length, dark brown hair, a tattoo beneath her belly button, and facial features obliterated by blunt force trauma, the combination of which makes Bailey _unbearable_ to be around at the moment.

Which is why John leaped at the opportunity to run down a lead at the U.C. Berkeley campus, a handwritten note on the back of a Berkeley flier tucked into the victim's bra, reading, "Sara- This is the best I could come up with on two hours notice. You're lucky I know my shit. Do us both a favor and give me a little more time on the next one? -Delaney."

At first, he'd figured drugs. College student, liberal campus, it wouldn't be the first time. Then, he started asking around and learned that 'Delaney' was something of a savior for students who didn't do their homework. "Dee can give you an A paper on anything," a tall, blonde coed tells him, and he suspects she's deliberately clutching her books to her chest to give him a better view of her cleavage. "The girl's a godsend. I had a lit paper I needed in a day, and she had it done for me within, like, four hours. I would've failed that class without her."

John gives her a charming smile and asks, "Any idea where I could find her?"

And that gives the girl pause for some reason. She looks at him, faintly suspicious, and asks, "Is she in trouble or something?"

"No," John assures her, turning on the charm. "We just need to ask her a few questions about a friend."

"Well, she could be a couple places. Café Firenze, if it's open; she usually hangs out there for a few hours every day so people can catch up with her or make appointments. Um... Oh! She might still be in the library. She was there earlier."

John thanks the coed and asks for directions to the library, declining the offer to be shown around personally. Apparently, Delaney Kyle is never that hard to track down when she's on campus, since several students point her out to him as soon as he asks. He finds her seated in the study area, alone, reading a book with her back to him, and he even though he's pretty sure, he asks, "Excuse me, are you Delaney Kyle?"

She turns around. And he hasn't been this shocked in a _long_ time.

"_Frances_?"

  
*

  
He should've known better than to turn away from her, even for an instant. He knows that, in retrospect. In the seconds it takes him to tell George he'll call back later, she disappears. He searches the crowd, goes on instinct and searches the back exit instead of the front one, and hears that she caught a ride with a student.

She leaves him with the check, of course.

The entire way back to the station, he contemplates how the hell he's going to tell Bailey that he both found and lost Frances in the space of an hour, still mildly stunned over his discovery, himself. Of all the things he'd been expecting on this case, Frances Malone was not even _near_ the fucking list. And he was pretty current on her suspected whereabouts, considering he was the one who was doing most of the work in tracking her down as a special favor for Bailey.

He'd felt... well, responsible is too strong a word, but it's the closest he can think of. Frances had come to him for help, and he hadn't been able to do much for her. If he'd had more time, maybe he could've convinced her that running away wasn't the answer. If, if, if, he thinks, because he still remembers the haggard, lost look on Bailey's face when he said that his daughter was gone and he needed John's help to find her.

Bailey's in a bad mood when he gets back to the station. "John! What'd you find?" he asks impatiently, sifting through the reports, and John knows it's just because he's still on edge, will be on edge until John tells him there's no way their victim is Frances. He notices the details, like Grace sitting at a desk, and Sam leaning over, quietly talking to her while still observing him and Bailey closely.

"The victim wasn't on drugs," John hedges. "Or, if she was, Delaney wasn't her dealer."

"That was news twenty minutes ago when Grace gave me the tox report," Bailey snaps, and even though John knows it's just because he's on edge, it grates. "Does this Delaney have any possible connection to solving this case?"

"No," John tells him, annoyed. "Unless 'runaway' fits Sam's profile for the murderer."

Bailey looks at him, waits for an explanation as Sam walks up, and John forces himself to calm down enough that saying this isn't just to take Bailey down a peg. "Turns out," he says quietly, "Delaney Kyle is the alias Frances has been using."

And Bailey is looking at him like he just hit him in the face with a brick. "What-- How-- Are you sure?"

"I talked to her," John admits. "She basically said that she wasn't coming back, and I couldn't force her to, and then she ditched me and disappeared. George is running a check on the name 'Delaney Kyle'."

Still looking dumbstruck, Bailey asks, "How'd she look?"

John's glad that he doesn't have to lie about this, at least, and answers, "She looked good."

Silence, for a long moment, and Bailey finally nods. "Let's get back to work, then."

  
*

  
Sam tracks him down in the hotel bar after his third drink and asks, "What really happened?"

He snorts, finishing his third drink in one harsh, cough-inducing swallow of bourbon that sets his throat on fire. Signaling to the bartender for another, he asks roughly, "That obvious, huh?"

She raises an eyebrow.

"Well, first she tried to run. The she yelled at me, quietly, of course, since we were in the library, about how Bailey should be _grateful_ she ran away since he was just going to ship her off to boarding school, anyway, and this way he saves money on tuition." Off Sam's sympathetic wince, he continues, "Then, she told me that my 'wanting to help her' act was good, but she wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, and ditched me as soon as I turned my back to her for a second."

Sighing, Sam takes his new glass and sips the bourbon delicately. "What a mess."

"George's check turned up a rental agreement for a house near the university," he continues, idly tapping his fingers against the bar. "I dropped by, but she already cleared out. She's not dumb enough to keep using the name Delaney Kyle, and if she has a car, it wasn't registered under that name. I told George to look at bus and plane records for the day, but it could be any name on the list."

"John, we make a living out of finding people who don't want to be found," Sam tells him softly. "Just because she's Bailey's daughter--"

"I should've tried harder." And there it is, out on the table. "I should've talked her out of it."

"She wanted to leave. She was probably planning it even when she talked to you," Sam leans against the bar, resting her head against a hand as she looks at him, a wry smile on her face. "You're charming, John, but not that charming."

He finds himself smiling at that, just as their pagers go off.

  
*

  
Jack strikes in downtown San Francisco less than twelve hours after the VCTF arrived, obviously knowing Sam was in the area. It throws her off-balance more than it usually does, and for the first time in a while, John notices the dark circles under her eyes and the way she tenses when anyone gets within five feet of her.

Mentions it to Bailey, and by the next morning, wishes to hell he hadn't.

"Rachel Burke," she introduces herself like he hasn't seen her naked and sprawled across his kitchen table wearing nothing but whipped cream. "Nice to meet you."

He lets a few seconds lapse, letting her know he's onto her game before he plays along. "John Grant."

"Rachel's here to lend us a hand with Jack," Bailey says gruffly, and Sam doesn't look at all surprised at this turn of events. "A fresh set of eyes on this may help us see something we haven't seen before."

"I've seen it before," John mutters under his breath before excusing himself to check on something.

"I ran that list of names for you," George follows him out. "Hacked into a few encrypted databases, checked with the DMV, the IRS, and I found that there's only six names on your list that don't have a permanent address on file or a driver's license. Two of those were men, one was fifty-three, and another fits the description for a woman with a warrant out for tax evasion."

"What were the two that were left?"

"Jamie Brown and Melissa Clarke. Jamie was headed for Reno, and Melissa was going to San Diego."

He doesn't know why he assumes Frances is Melissa. It would be more logical for her to head out of state, put as much distance between herself and her father as possibly, but something tells him that she knows everyone would think that. John's learned to trust his hunches, and he calls in a 'wanted for questioning' APB to the San Diego P.D.

Bailey hits the roof when he finds out, and there's a lot of yelling and insults before he calms down enough to stop making it personal. "Damn it, John, you should've consulted me about this!"

"You would've said no," John replies, pure logic. "I said she was a witness wanted for questioning, Bailey. They're not going to drag her off the street in cuffs."

Sighing, Bailey sits down heavily and scrubs at his face with his hands. "I spoke with my other daughter this morning."

This isn't quite what he expected, but he sits down across from Bailey and waits.

"She's thirteen. Janet calls her a miniature Frances," Bailey flips through his wallet and hands John a folded photograph of Frances, laughing and unguarded, her arms around a younger girl who did indeed look like a smaller version of her. "Arianna refuses to discuss Frances with me. Says that if I was so worried about them, I shouldn't have abandoned them."

And there's really nothing to say in response to that.

Bailey's expression changes completely, and John can tell instantly there won't be more discussion about this. At least not today. "Go see if George has found anything."

  
*

  
The APB gives him a few leads that go nowhere, and three weeks after seeing Frances, John has a list of names that match her description in various parts of the western United States. George takes the list from him periodically and runs searches, crossing off possibilities where he can and making notes about any oddities that pop up. Sam works up possible profiles for him in her downtime, paying special attention to anything that might hint at where Frances would go or what alias she might use.

Bailey never mentions the fact he knows John carries a file on Frances in his briefcase.

He's free at the moment, waiting for the results of Grace's autopsy before he can continue his investigation, and he's looking over the revised version of the list when Rachel comes up behind him and peers over his shoulder like they're still at Quantico.

Really, he's going to have a talk with Bailey. Two profilers are totally unnecessary.

"Is that the suspect list for the Howard case?" she asks, leaning into his personal space, coffee in hand. On a normal day, he wouldn't mind the personal space thing so much, but until he finds a way to _prove_ they did sleep together, she's annoying the fuck out of him. "Those are all female names."

The question in her tone is also annoying the fuck out of him. "Well, there's something none of _us_ ever noticed before. It's a good thing Bailey brought you in."

"And is 'us' you and your imaginary friends?" she throws back easily. On a normal day, he wouldn't mind a challenge, but he's tired and annoyed and his APB has turned up shit in the last three weeks. Frances Malone is proving as hard to find as any serial killer. "If you're looking for a date, NCIC probably isn't the best way to go. Unless you've exhausted the local population already."

"Sweetheart, one night with me is enough to exhaust anybody," he's all suggestiveness and smarmy confidence, and Sam's rolling her eyes at them as she walks up. He holds the file with the list of names out to her, knowing she'll get right away what he's working on. (It's not like he works on much else in his downtime recently.) "Sam, new list."

Sam takes the folder, carefully looking over the names. She also walks around the desk and lets Rachel look at it, which irritates John on a level that's somewhat akin to a preschooler being forced to share his toys. "Huh," Rachel says, eyes narrowing as she looks up at Sam. "Do you see that?"

"What?" John sits up straighter, looking at Sam. Rachel just ignores him until Sam echoes the question.

Setting her coffee on the desk, Rachel takes the folder and runs her finger down the page. "Bianca Luce in Phoenix, Arizona, Desdemona Montano in Las Cruces and Celia Frederick in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Helena Lennox in Amarillo, Texas, and Adriana Dromio in Lawton, Oklahoma."

"Gee, I always wanted somebody to read my files to me."

"Shakespeare," Sam sighs, tilting her head, like she can't believe she missed it, taking his pen and underlining names, writing in the margins. "All the names are from plays by Shakespeare. Wasn't Delaney Kyle--"

"An English Lit major. Fuck," John shakes his head, because he _never_ would've gotten that from looking at a list for thirty seconds, even _knowing_ that Frances had favored an alias that wrote god knew how many papers on Shakespeare. "What other names on that list are from plays? Or books?"

Between the two of them, they find another seven names that could've come from some kind of literature, and John flags down George to run the new list through his databases for any kind of information. It takes George ridiculously little time to find that all seven of the new names were hard identities with addresses, income tax files, and in most cases, parking tickets. Of the original five, only one couldn't possibly be Frances.

That left him with four possibilities. "Bianca Luce, Desdemona Montano, Helena Lennox, Adriana Dromio."

How easily Sam can read him is still a little eerie. "Which one do you think?"

He stares at the names on George's computer screen, scanning the locations. "Adriana Dromio," he finally says, and it's pure instinct, but he still feels like he has to justify it somehow since Rachel's in the room. "It's a long shot, but Melissa Clarke's passenger registration listed her home address in Oklahoma." He pauses, and tells Sam quietly, "This feels like Frances."

Sam merely nods, inclining her head. "Take it to Bailey."

On his way out the door, he hears Rachel asking Sam, "Who is Frances?", but he doesn't wait to hear the explanation.

Bailey's closed in his office, going over old case files that have been closed for years. Until the Howard investigation closes, there aren't any other reports that need to be written, and John suspects there's a lack of administrative tasks for Bailey to fill his time with at the moment. He knocks, two sharp raps of his knuckles on the door, and walks in without waiting for Bailey to look up. Without preamble, he tells his boss, "I need some vacation time."

"Not right now," Bailey answers, distracted. "We may have a new lead on Jack."

"I have a new lead on your daughter."

Bailey's head snaps up. "Where?"

"Oklahoma."

Not even a split-second of indecision. "Call me when you get there."


	3. I've been to Africa looking for my soul, and I feel like an actor looking for a role.

Adriana Dromio is the twenty-two year old daughter of a business magnate who likes to indulge his only child. She's in Lawton on business, although she just smiles mysteriously at anyone who tries to question her about what that business is or why it's so important she's away from home for the holidays.

Her suite has been paid through New Year's on a Bank of America Visa card bearing her name.

The account is genuine. The card is not.

She mentioned her paranoia about carrying cash to Bobby LeDeux, and when he found out just how _much_ cash she typically carried, he opened a bank account for her in his name, taking out both debit and credit cards for her. He had identical cards made with various new names she'd created stamped on them, probably from the same guy who'd created new I.D. and papers for her six new identities. (Just in case, she ditched all her old ones after Berkeley.) Driver's licenses, passports, birth certificates, all impressively faked to pass any scrutiny she might face.

But she works very hard to avoid any scrutiny.

The Best Western has a casino on-grounds, and as it happens, Adriana Dromio is _very_ good at poker. The seven thousand dollars in winnings kind of good, and she's avoiding the casino tonight just to keep herself from drawing too much attention. The lounge is decorated with Christmas lights and mistletoe and a tasteful tree in the corner, instrumental holiday jazz wafting through the nearly empty bar so softly it might as well be coming from another room, and she's enjoying the atmosphere almost more than the expensive vodka.

"I'd ask to buy you a drink, but you're underage." The voice is soft, close to her ear, and she stiffens as John moves past her and sits down across from her, taking the empty seat with so much confidence that anyone in the bar would assume she had been waiting for him. "You know, it's considered rude to leave without saying goodbye."

"The company sucked," she snaps, drinking more than she should. Jesus Christ, this is the last thing she expected, and it pisses her off she isn't more prepared. She should've had a contingency plan for if they found her again, but she'd let herself believe that it wouldn't happen right away. "What is your obsession here?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Are you going to listen or just assume that everything I say is a lie?"

"Yeah, that's not too much fun to put up with, is it?" she asks pointedly, sipping her drink.

Sighing, he reaches across the table and takes her drink, raising it to his lips, and she tells herself that this is just another kind of poker game. Avoid tells. Bluff. She can do this. "Girls on the street, Frances. Do you have any idea--"

"Oh, for Christ's sake," she rolls her eyes, carefully keeping her voice quiet to avoid attention. "Do I look like I'm on the fucking street? I'm in a two-hundred dollar a night hotel, wearing a fifteen-hundred dollar dress. I probably make more money than you do."

"Touché," he shrugs, sipping her vodka. "You were lucky."

"Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect," she quotes and takes her glass back, sipping. "Emerson. Luck has nothing to do with it. I'm just very good at whatever I choose to do."

"And what are you choosing to do now?"

The question puts her on the defensive, and she gets sarcastic when she's defensive. "Oh, you mean aside from fucking every businessman staying here for a grand a night?"

"You take everything so personally," he rolls his eyes. "I wasn't implying anything."

Her smile is diamonds and ice, hard and unrelenting. "You work for my father. You think like him. You believe the worst about me."

"Do I?" his smile, on the other hand, is all charm, meant to disarm and seduce. "Tell me what's true."

(_I don't know what you've heard about me, but it doesn't sound good. It's also not true._)

Shaking her head, she finishes her drink in one elegant swallow and tries not to think about the girl she was the last time he said that to her. She'd never been naive, but she'd _wanted_ \-- validation, belief, she's still not sure, but it was enough to know that she'd wanted something she was never going to get. "I need another drink."

"You're underage."

"My driver's license says otherwise." It's taunting the bull, but she waves the waiter over and asks for another drink, anyway. John merely smiles. "Seriously, John, what do you want from me? I'm not going back. I'm not calling my dad," she deliberately puts heavy, sarcastic emphasis on the word 'dad'. "I'm happy with where I am."

"Then why are you still running?"

Silence for a long minute as she stares at him. "Because I can."

He reaches out, his hand covering hers, and he's changed his persona from charming and seductive to serious and earnest at the drop of a dime. She almost admires it. "Give me a week, Frances," he says softly, eyes focused on her. "One week where you promise not to run yet and I won't call your father and tell him where you are."

"What's the catch?"

"You listen." Echoes of sirens and flashing lights in those two words, a world of meaning in the inflection, and she almost admires how good he is at acting the part in these little scenes. "Seriously listen, and you think about what you're doing."

She knows exactly what she's doing, but she doesn't say that. "What is it I'm getting out of this?"

"A week to convince me to stop tracking you down every time you run."

Trusting him would be stupid. "How do I know you won't call my father?"

"You'll just have to trust me." At the look on her face, he adds, "Like I'm trusting you not to run the instant you're out of my sight."

Oh, but this is _such_ a stupid, stupid idea. She's not drunk enough to excuse this kind of stupidity.

"Deal," she holds out her hand, shakes his firmly as he echoes the word, and leaves the bar before the implications of what she just did become clear in her head. Before she even hits the elevator, she reprimands herself, "I am _so_ stupid."

  
*

  
"I did something pretty dumb last night."

"Is this something you think a thirteen year old should be hearing?" Arianna's voice is a step away from asleep, but still manages to be wry and amused. "I know I told you I'd been to second base, but I really don't need the details on third and home yet."

"Ha fucking ha," Frannie rolls her eyes as she paces the living room of her suite, shades open to reveal the steady snowfall outside. Unfortunately, she's too wound up to enjoy the serene view. "Wake the fuck up. This is important."

"What?" Arianna sounds much more alert. "Are you okay? Is something wrong?"

"Dad's guy tracked me down again."

"Fuck," Arianna sighs, and sounds entirely too much like Frannie doing it. "Do you need me to do anything? I can fake a mental breakdown so the 'rents have to focus on me for a while."

"No, that's okay," Frannie shakes her head. "I agreed to give him a week to convince me to come home."

Silence. "Okay," the word is drawn out into at least three syllables. "Do I need to ask why?"

"I don't know why I did it," Frannie drops into an armchair heavily, frustrated beyond words. "I knew it was stupid, Ree, even when I was agreeing to it, I knew it was the dumbest thing I could've possibly done. And I _still_ did it."

"Well, you are only eighteen."

"Twenty-two."

"Adriana's twenty-two. You're eighteen."

"So, you're saying this is because I'm not fully invested in the character?"

"I'm saying no matter what age you're pretending to be, underneath it all, you're still only eighteen," Arianna says sensibly, sounding much more mature than Frannie herself did at the moment. "Describe this guy."

"This isn't about that."

"You won't describe him. It's _totally_ about that."

"I'm not going to sleep with him."

"Gee, where have I heard that before?"

"Fuck off, smartass. I may be stupid, but I'm not _that_ stupid," Frannie says, annoyed that her sister managed to pick up on that bout of insanity over the phone in less than five minutes. A knock at the door interrupts her line of thought, and she heads for the door. "Thank god, room service. Maybe I can get them to send me a drink."

Arianna's laughing. "We really should talk about this alcohol problem of yours."

Opens the door, and John's leaning casually in the doorway, looking like something out of GQ. And this is just _so_ not fucking fair, because she's stupid right now and he's taking advantage of it. Quietly, more of a question than a statement, he says, "You're still here."

"We had a deal," she tries for nonchalant, but isn't quite sure she hits the mark.

"Ooh, is this the FBI agent you're _not_ describing?"

She can practically hear the smirk in Arianna's voice. "Fuck off and die," she snaps, hanging up abruptly to the sound of her little sister laughing at her stupidity, and John just looks at her. Sweetly, she lies, "Telemarketer."

He clearly doesn't buy that for a second. Stepping back, she leaves the door open as an invitation and heads back toward the living room, entirely unsure what the hell he's expecting from her. She hears the door click shut quietly, and realizes a second too late that the bedroom is clearly visible.

Which wouldn't be so bad, if there weren't half-packed suitcases strewn across the bed.

To his credit, John just says, "Glad you stuck around."

"I keep my word." And it's true. She's never once gone back on something she agreed to do. It's why she so rarely actually agrees to anything. "And nobody's shown up on my doorstep ready to drag me off somewhere yet."

"I keep my word, too." The silence is awkward and uncomfortable, and it's sheer stubborn habit that won't let her break it somehow first. Finally, John sighs and makes his way to the couch. "So, it had to be Oklahoma?"

"What's wrong with Oklahoma?"

"Beside the tornadoes?"

"Don't be ridiculous," she rolls her eyes and flops down in the armchair, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "We're out of tornado season. If one happened to strike now, it would be a statistical anomaly."

"That makes me feel so much better," he grins wryly. "Seriously, why Oklahoma?"

"I don't know," she shrugs, unsure why she's so uncomfortable with this line of questioning. Oklahoma was a whim, picked simply because it was smack dab in between California and Atlanta. (Not to mention, as far away from Baltimore as she could get without getting back to Berkeley.) Finally, she says, "I like the snow."

And winces, because how lame was that?

John just nods like he doesn't notice. "It used to snow in Boston around Christmas." Either that is a total non-sequitur, or he's from Boston. She's guessing the latter. He continues, "Doesn't really feel like Christmas without it anymore."

She's a little too busy trying to discern his new angle to figure out what that odd tone of voice denotes, but she files it away for future reference, anyway. Her cell ringing interrupts anything she might have thought to say in response, and she doesn't bother looking at the caller I.D. before answering with a terse, "Call you back," and hanging up.

It has to be Bobby. Ree wouldn't call her back knowing John's here.

And nobody else has this number.

John stares at the phone like he thinks he can magically figure out who would be calling her, and she changes the subject. "What exactly are you hoping to accomplish here?" She cuts him off with a wave of her hand before he can speak, "Come on, John. You're not dumb enough to actually believe you can change my mind about coming home. What are actually trying to do?"

"Has anyone ever told you that you're paranoid?"

"Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me."

He studies her for a long moment, leaning forward. "I do want to convince you to come home. Or at least to talk to Bailey." Before she can roll her eyes and call him a liar, he continues, "And maybe I just want to understand why you did it."

"That's easy," she says carelessly, fighting back anxiety, and why the hell is this making her anxious? She has absolutely no reason to be anxious about _this_, but her pulse is picking up, and she has the odd urge to pace, or twist her hair between her fingers, or any of a dozen other tiny tells she thought she got rid of at fifteen. "I wasn't too keen on being shipped off to Alcatraz Academy."

"I'm sure Bailey had his--"

"Oh, fuck you," she pushes herself to her feet and heads for the bedroom and her half-packed suitcases, one of which has to have a bottle of aspirin. "Three god damn weeks he had me before he wanted to ship me off. My mom's a bitch, but she kept me for nine years and never thought of handing me over to strangers. But that's _Dad's_ way. When the going gets rough, he gets rid of us."

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe he just didn't know how to deal with the trouble you were getting in?"

"Yeah, and whose fault would that be?" finally, she locates the aspirin and pops three in her mouth, swallowing them dry. Now, if she could just find her emergency cigarettes. (She just has to keep creating characters who don't smoke. Masochist, thy name is... well, Adriana right now.) "I saw him exactly twice from the time I was eight until the time I was seventeen. He's the one who came back into my life pretending like he gave a shit about me. I should've known better."

John's silent for so long that she finally turns around to look at him. He stares at her for two beats, then says, "Let's go get lunch."

Subject change. She can go for that.

  
*

  
Lunch is remarkably like a first date.

They avoid any mention of Bailey or running or really, anything they've ever talked about before. That leaves the typical first date talk, like stories about growing up and past vacations. John surprises her with how good he is about not calling her 'Frances' in public, and she manages to keep the paranoid suspicions to a minimum when he asks about the places she's been recently.

She leaves out the month each spent in Miami and New York, helping out with Bobby LeDeux's businesses, and glosses over San Diego when he asks. Mostly, she tells him about Berkeley since he already knew about that character, and she doesn't see the harm in filling in the background a little. Lets herself ramble a bit about the atmosphere of the coffeehouses and poetry readings, the Berkeley library, and he asks her, curious, "Did you ever think about going to college?"

He actually seems genuinely interested, so she tries to keep the suspicious attitude in the back of her mind for a bit. "Sometimes," she shrugs, sipping her water, glancing out the window at the snowfall. "I learn more on my own than I ever did in school, though."

"What do you mean?"

"Did _you_ ever go to high school? Nobody's there to actually learn anything. They're there to try to distract the teacher with pointless questions as long as possible, avoid homework, or work their way up to the most popular clique," she rolls her eyes. "I once skipped an entire week of classes, and managed to get caught back up completely in two hours. And I was in all A.P. classes."

"I thought Bailey put you in one of the private schools," he almost winces on saying the name, but presses ahead. "Wasn't Atlanta any better?"

"You're the one he stuck on investigating me, right? Didn't you ever look at my grades? My records?" The 'from the way Bailey talked, I assumed you were failing everything' just hangs in the air between them, and she shakes her head. "Never mind. Yes, Atlanta was just as boring as Baltimore."

The rest of lunch is spent in slightly awkward, but not quite tense, silence, and John walks her back to her room, casually mentioning he might drop by later in the evening. He probably doesn't mean it as a warning, but it puts her back up, anyway, and she slams the door on him. She _hates_ that she's given him enough of a lure that he'll probably look into her school records now, because that was just sheer vain offense at somebody else automatically assuming she was stupid just because she skipped out on school all the time.

She calls Bobby back as soon as she gets in, flopping down on the king size bed and sighing heavily as he answers, and she groans without greeting, "I'm so fucked. Tell me how stupid I am."

"Don't be melodramatic. You're not stupid," she can practically hear Bobby rolling his eyes at her, and it's nice. In a comforting, but wholly annoying way. "And I'm hoping you're not actually fucked, either."

"Baby, if you were hoping to protect my virtue, you're about five years too late," she says breezily, but he's always been able to tell when she's forcing levity, so she moves on quickly. "I should be packing. Right now. I should be packing and making travel arrangements and coming up with new characters. I should be _leaving_, out the fucking window or off the fucking balcony if I have to."

"So, why aren't you?"

"I don't know."

"Copout," he says dismissively, and while part of her appreciates that he'll call her on her bullshit? She _hates_ how she can't get anything past him. "You do know. Are you staying because you're attracted to this guy, or because you want to believe your dad cares enough to send him?"

And she hates how he cuts to the heart of the problem before she even realizes what it is.

"I don't give two god damns what my so-called father cares about," she denies vehemently, rolling off the bed and pacing. Tell. Damn it, she hates feeling this out of control. "He was getting rid of me. He's got no fucking right to play the wounded party now and pretend he misses me. He would've shipped me off to boarding school and only thought about me when he was signing the fucking checks, just like the past ten years."

She's _so_ not crying about this. She's just _not_.

"Sweetheart, it's okay," Bobby soothes softly. "I know you're still upset about the whole childhood thing, but I need you to do something for me. Not right now, but when you calm down, I need you to consider the source on all those things your mom told you."

Exhales sharply, because the mom thing is never a fun discussion to be having. "So what if she's exaggerating about the whole child support thing? Actions speak louder, Bobby. Cards on Christmas and a visit every four years says a whole hell of a lot more. He forgot my birthday three years in a row, you know. Mom faked cards when I was little, forged his handwriting, but she sucked at it. I was with him three weeks before he had enough of me."

"Janet's a decent mother to you when the whim strikes her to play one," Bobby interrupts her coldly, and this is exactly why discussing her mother with him is never a good idea. By the time they broke up, he was spending more time with her than with her mother, and he knows too much about their relationship to ever consider Janet Malone good parental material. "Don't make the mistake of sanctifying her just because you're pissed at your father, or I might be forced to remind you she's made some fucking monumental mistakes with you, too."

"She never left," Frannie says stubbornly.

"You might have been better off if she had."

"I might have been better off if you'd taken me with you when _you_ left," she counters, and it's a low blow, she knows it as soon as the words leave her mouth and she hears him react to it. Immediately, she apologizes, "Sorry. That was uncalled for."

He's quiet for a long second, and there's nothing worse in the world for her than when they argue like this. Finally, he says softly, "You know I would've taken you if I could have, right? I mean, if I wasn't damn sure Janet would've accused me of kidnapping you or molesting you or something, I would've said fuck it and taken you with me. I would've said fuck it, anyway, if I thought you were in any danger. You know that, right?"

"Yeah, I know," she tells him, and she means it wholeheartedly. "She would've, too. It pissed her off like nothing else that you broke up with her and still kept in contact with me."

"It pissed her off I broke up with her over you."

Wait, what? "What?"

Bobby sighs. "We used to fight all the time about you. She hated that I'd stick up for you when you did something that pissed her off. She hated that whenever I spent the night, I wound up on the couch with you watching infomercials at three in the morning. She hated that we were friends and always assumed I must've wanted to get in your pants. When she started implying you were throwing yourself at me and talking about shipping you off to your father, I ended it."

How could she have possibly missed that? She opens her mouth, but this is one of those rare times when the words just aren't coming to her. "H-- Why didn't you ever tell me?"

"You had enough abandonment issues," Bobby manages to sound both comforting and uncomfortable all at once, and she can practically hear him raking a hand through his hair. "Besides, I didn't want you running away and getting yourself into trouble."

She can't help but laugh at the wry irony to that. "Good thing you waited, then."

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, Kid. Are we cool?"

"Course we are," she rolls her eyes. "Want to meet me in Miami for New Year's?"

  
*

  
There's a reason the saying is _in vinos veritas_.

"I looked into your school records," John informs her as he pours another round of drinks. She's lost count of what round they're on now, but it's so many that she actually kind of likes him at the moment, which really can't be good. Even if she can't remember why. Her feet are propped up in his lap, and she's tilting her head to the left as she watches him. "Why didn't you just say that you're a genius?"

"Genius is a little strong," she laughs, accepting the glass he holds out to her. "I'm smart. So are lots of other people."

"Lots of other people weren't members of Mensa at eleven years old."

She shrugs. "You say potato. I was interpretating Shakespeare at nine, Dante and Milton at eleven. I know obscure literature as well as any graduate student. My sister refers to me as a creative genius -- words, music, art, they come to me as easily as breathing. But I never got past algebra and I was lucky to get C's in science classes. Actual geniuses are good at all that stuff."

"I still think it's pretty amazing."

He sounds pretty sincere, but she still finds herself saying, "Yeah, well, I must've cheated or something."

"Why do you do that?" he asks, managing to sound both curious and non-threatening at the same time, which he must have really been working on. Even in normal conversation, cops sound like they're interrogating people, she knows. She just raises an eyebrow. "Put yourself down like that? You should be proud."

"I should be a lot of things," she raises her drink in mock-salute, tossing back most of it in a single swallow. With an obvious wince, because that _burned_. Her voice sounds raspier as she says, "But I'm not, so why bother?"

Unfortunately, John's apparently not drunk enough to just let things go at that. "You don't give yourself enough credit, Frances. If I could do half the things you could--"

"Please," she rolls her eyes. "Like what? I can write papers on obscure British poets. That's real comparable to saving lives."

"I don't save lives."

"Yes, you do."

"Frannie, the VCTF mainly handles unusual homicides. Most of our cases are dead when we get there."

"And when you catch the killer, you save the victim he would've taken next."

John pauses. "Huh. You know, I never thought about it like that."

"Well, you're not a genius," she teases, and that sounded a lot more flirtatious than it should have been, even to her. He just grins back at her, and she's definitely in trouble when that's getting her hot. This is precisely why she shouldn't ever drink. Looking down at her drink, she tries to focus. Turn the conversation around to him so she doesn't do something stupid. "So, why'd you become a cop?"

He gets quiet very fast at that. "Usual reasons, I guess. Wanting to help people. Put criminals away."

"No, that's not it," she studies him carefully. She's fluent in body language, has to be to size up marks at the casino, and he's closed off, hiding something. "Maybe a little, but that's not all of it."

He looks at her, the slightest hint of a frown in his expression. "My father was a criminal," he finally says distantly. "I wanted to be as far from like him as I could get."

'Join the club' is on the tip of her tongue, but she knows it would wreck the moment and she can't do it, even if would be smarter. "Looks like you won, then," she says softly, and his gaze is steady, focused on her. Electricity in the air, and this is a turning point, she knows. She could say something else, change the direction they're going back to something safe.

The thing is, she doesn't _want_ to.

They lean into each other like it's natural, the only possible ending for the scene, and his hand comes up to touch the side of her face as he kisses her. And she ignores all the reasons she shouldn't be doing this and all the excuses she can't use to cover and focuses on the moment, on the way his lips feel against hers, the way his tongue feels sliding against hers, and she thinks she whimpers a little when he pulls back. "This is a bad idea," he murmurs, touching his forehead against hers, thumb stroking gently against her cheekbone. "Tell me you don't want it."

She should. Instead, a breath of a whisper, she says, "I _want_ it."

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she registers the sounds of their drinks hitting the floor, but John's shifting her into his lap, kissing her again, harder, and now she knows she's whimpering as her fingers curl around the soft material of his shirt, trying to pull him even closer. His hands are hot on her skin, gliding under her shirt as he tugs it over her head, wet heat of his mouth traveling down the line of her throat as she lets her head fall back, and she might be saying _yes_ and _please_ and _more_ and _John_, or maybe it's just in her head.

Her name is a caress against the lace of her bra as he presses his mouth there, and she's shaking. She fumbles with the buttons on his shirt briefly before frustration overpowers her and she just _pulls_, tearing sound and buttons flying everywhere, and John's grinning as he lifts his hands to cup her face and bring her mouth back to his. "Never liked this shirt, anyway."

"Hope you don't like those pants, either," she slides her hands over his chest as he laughs and kisses her again, and again, and _oh, that's good_ and _yes_ and _that, there_. Presses her mouth to his neck as he lifts her in his arms, and she's wrapping her legs around his waist as he stumbles around the coffee table toward the bedroom.

Gasps, startled when he drops her to the bed, and it turns to a moan almost instantly as his body covers hers, every inch of him against her, pressing her down into the mattress, and the weight of him on top of her is the best thing she's ever felt. His mouth is trailing down her stomach, and she's not sure when her pants disappeared, but _god, yes_ she doesn't care because his mouth is _there_, just where she needs him, and she moans again, and again, and _again_, clutching fistfuls of the sheets as she loses her mind completely.

He doesn't give her the chance to get it back, and he's kissing her, the taste of her in his mouth, and she wants _more_, and _everything_, and _now_, and she's using her weight to propel them both over until she's straddling his hips, grinding down against him, and he growls a harsh, "Fuck, yes," as his fingers dig into her hips. And then he's saying, "Wait, wait," and she doesn't understand, she's too far gone to understand, but his grip on her tightens, and he's breathing hard, groaning. "Fuck, I don't have anything."

She whimpers, can't tell if she's asking what anything he's talking about. "Condoms," he says, his forehead touching hers as he kisses her again, holding her hips still when she tries to move. "I wasn't expecting-- I didn't bring any."

It says way, way too much when she tells him, "Nightstand," because she _was_ expecting it, and he knows, she can see he knows, but she knew, too, from the second she lied to Ree and said it wasn't about that, because it was. Stretches over him, pulls the drawer open and grasps the little foil packets that say too much about her, and she shudders as John moves beneath her in the just the right--

And he's flipping them both over, taking control again, and she doesn't care, doesn't care at _all_ as long as he _moves_, and she breathes out a long sigh when he finally does, and _oh, yes_, and _please_, and he's grasping her hands, pressing them down into the mattress as his tongue slides against hers, and she bites his lip, gently, a tease that makes him growl like she's whimpering.

He gets one hand down between them, his thumb moving against her until she's breaking apart, gasping, begging him _more_ and _yes_ and _oh_ and _oh!_, and he's groaning, "Christ, Frannie," as he shudders against her, mouth wet and hot against her neck. Her breath catches on his name as she shatters beneath his hands and his mouth and the perfect, perfect weight of him.

Even as she's coming back down, she knows it was a mistake.


	4. I've been wandering, but I just don't care.

John knows, without a doubt, the second he opens his eyes, that Frances bailed.

Looking back, he probably should have known the instant she pulled condoms out of the nightstand. There's no way she _wasn't_ planning the whole thing through, and she wouldn't have had the condoms without planning for what to do after the sex.

The disturbingly hot sex that he never should've let himself have. With Bailey's _daughter_.

He groans, putting his head in his hands as his cell phone rings. "Yeah?" he rasps as he works on getting his pants back on. George's voice on the other end is like a bucket of ice water on his head. "No, I still haven't tracked her down," he lies, suddenly thankful for his foresight in not telling Bailey the instant he found Frances. "I don't think she's in Lawton, at least not anymore."

Shit, he forgot about the buttons on his shirt. He sighs as he shrugs it on, anyway, only half-listening to George. Then Bailey's voice cuts into the line, and John bangs his head on the dresser in shock as he tries to get his shoe back on. "John, any luck?"

He's going to hell. And not just the normal hell, the special hell. "No."

"Then we need you back here," Bailey's voice has the barest hint of disappointment, hidden well, and John hasn't felt this guilty in a long time. "Jack got into the building. Left roses and a message in Sam's office."

"Christ," John groans. And the hits just keep on coming. "I'll be on the first flight I can get."

  
*

  
Three hours back in Atlanta, and Sam's already figured out that something happened in Lawton. Being Sam, she doesn't push him about it; she offers to listen if he needs to talk about anything and leaves it at that. Rachel, being Rachel, isn't quite so diplomatic and starts interrogating him the second Bailey and Sam head out to track a lead. "You found her, didn't you?"

John's head snaps up, surprised, and he realizes an instant too late that he just proved her right. Fuck. "How the hell did you figure that out?"

"You wouldn't be this irritable if nothing happened," Rachel drops into the chair across his desk and studies him, sipping her coffee. "Obviously, you couldn't convince her to come back."

And that rankles. "Let me tell you something, sweetheart, you're not that good a profiler. You think just because Sam gave you a summary of what happened last year, you know what's going on? You don't have the first clue about Frances Malone."

Rachel doesn't rise to his bait, just sits there eyeing him curiously, and it's annoying as fuck. "So tell me about her."

He snorts, rolling his eyes. "Why? You think you can convince her to come home? You'd never even track her down in the first place, much less get her to talk to you."

"Look, John, I don't know why you decided off the bat that you hate me, but I'm good enough at what I do that everyone else on this team trusts me to help with their cases," Rachel leans forward, serious and clearly not willing to take much more bullshit. "Sam tells me that Frances is your case, that you were the only one Bailey was willing trust with it. I thought maybe you might like a fresh point of view on it since everybody else is so close to it. If you ever decide you do, you know where to find me."

It kills him that she's right. She's not even a few feet from his desk when he says, resigned, "Wait." She turns halfway, looks at him, and he sighs, "Let's go get a drink."

She meets him at the bar a few blocks away from headquarters, and he orders himself a whiskey even though it's barely four in the afternoon. The bar is nearly empty, and he waits for the waitress to leave before leaning back in his chair and looking at Rachel. "Frannie is... well, there aren't really words to describe her," he rakes a hand through his hair. "She's smart. Hell, that's an understatement -- she's a certified genius. She's also a god damn chameleon who's difficult to track on a good day."

Rachel nods, idly tracing her fingers over the tabletop as she asks, "Why'd she leave? Sam mentioned that there were some problems with Bailey."

John shakes his head. "According to her, Bailey got sick of her after three weeks and wanted to ship her off to boarding school. According to Bailey, she was getting herself into situation after situation, and he wanted to do something to put her on the right path before she turned eighteen and could destroy herself."

"And the truth lies somewhere in between?"

More of a statement than a question, but he nods anyway. "Bailey was considering sending her to Dickens, a lockdown facility." Rachel winces, and John nods, knowing exactly what she's thinking. "She'd been getting into some trouble, hanging out with the wrong crowd. Talking to her now, I think she was testing Bailey. And he failed miserably."

"Certified genius," Rachel murmurs. "What did you mean by that?"

"She has an I.Q. in the ninety-ninth percentile. She joined Mensa when she was eleven," he recites the facts George gave him before softening a bit. "In her own words, she's smart, but so are a lot of other people. First time I found her, she was running a business at U.C. Berkeley, writing papers for students. According to George, she was having papers published on literature and poetry when she was fifteen."

"She was bored," Rachel sighs, a picture obviously forming in her head. "A girl that smart, school probably bored her to tears so she didn't see the point in going. She probably waited for recognition from Bailey of those achievements, and when she didn't get any, she started trying to get attention for doing the wrong things. You found her in Lawton."

It's not a question. "Yeah. I made a deal with her. I told her if she gave me a week to try to convince her to come home, I wouldn't tell Bailey where she was."

"And it only lasted three days? What happened to make her run?" John doesn't answer, taking a long drink, and Rachel's mouth drops open, astonished. "You slept with her!"

He chokes. "What?!"

"You had sex with her," Rachel's eyes glitter, clearly pleased with herself, and he coughs. "And then she ran. That's why you're not telling Bailey that you found her."

"It wasn't like that," he says defensively. "It's not like I spent the three days seducing her. And she's the one who bought condoms!"

The corners of Rachel's mouth quirk up, and she's obviously trying not to laugh. "Then what was it like?"

"I'm not talking about this with you."

"Why not?"

She looks so fucking amused, he can't help but try to knock her down a few pegs. "Gee, you're right, I can talk about it with the other woman who left in the middle of the night without bothering to say goodbye. Maybe you can give me some insight. Where'd you go when you left?"

"Back to my apartment," she answers calmly, sipping her drink. "Did you check her hotel room?"

Dumbfounded that she actually admitted it, John doesn't think before saying, "We were in her hotel room." Then, winces, and refocuses on the first part. "Why the 'we don't know each other' act if you remember Quantico?"

"Come on, John. I seriously doubt I was your only one-night stand," she raises an eyebrow, tucking her hair behind her ear. "Seemed easier to just try for a fresh start since we have to work together now. I thought it'd put your mind at ease that I wasn't looking for some long-term relationship with you just because we've slept together."

Huh. "Okay," he draws the word out, at a loss. "Makes sense."

"Good," she nods. "Can we get back to the matter at hand now?"

"Uh, yes?"

"Okay," Rachel's suddenly all business again. "She left in the middle of the night."

"She panicked," John sighs. "Her fight or flight instinct is set pretty firmly on flight."

"Is George checking on departures for the time period?"

"Yeah, but I doubt he'll find anything," he rubs a hand across his eyes. "I saw her new I.D. for Adriana Dromio, and it's high-quality. Frannie's nothing if not prepared -- she's probably got the same stuff for at least a few other aliases."

Rachel stirs her straw around her drink absently, lost in thought. "You slept with her in her hotel room?"

"Why is that important?" he asks, annoyed. "Yes, I slept with her. You don't need to keep reiterating it."

"No, dumbass," Rachel rolls her eyes. "_Her_ hotel room? Even Motel 8 requires a credit card on file to check in. You can't pay for a hotel with cash, anymore, and if she had to use a credit card--"

"It can be traced," John finishes, already withdrawing his cell phone from his pocket to call George. "I can't believe I didn't think of that."

"I am, occasionally, useful," Rachel smirks, and he shakes his head, smiling at her. "Tell George to see if he can find any bus or plane tickets paid for with the same credit card. Ten to one, you'll find the name she's using now."

  
*

  
"I have... _interesting_ news," George informs them when they meet him in the conference room. "The credit card used to pay for Frances' hotel room is registered to Adriana Dromio. But here's the interesting part -- the account actually exists. It's not a fake card."

Rachel reacts faster than he does. "Is the account under her name?"

"I don't know yet," George admits, typing at a speed that would make a cartoon character's fingers blur. "I can't find the name attached to the account. It routes through a couple different banks with different names and different destination account numbers on a loop. Somebody with _talent_ is making sure this isn't easily traced."

"A hacker?" John asks, furrowing his brow.

"A good one," George tells him. "This is high-level work, John. We're talking thousands of dollars."

"As she was nice enough to inform me, she probably makes more in two weeks than I make in a year," John gives a self-deprecating grin. "She was up close to eight grand in the casino by the time I got there. Money isn't a problem for her."

"She made eight grand in the casino? Good for her," George says, off-hand, as he continues typing. "Here's the part you aren't going to like. The credit card she used to pay for the hotel wasn't used at any bus station, train station, car rental agency, or airport. If she left, she was using a different credit card or she paid cash at the bus station."

Flash of inspiration, and John asks, "Can you search for a cell phone registered to Adriana Dromio?"

"That'll take me a bit," George says, but he's already pulling up new windows on his laptop. "Give me a couple hours and I'll have something for you."

It's clearly a dismissal; George is already focused on the screen like it holds the answers to the universe, and he doesn't need any distractions. John inclines his head to the door, and Rachel follows him out. "Sam and Bailey don't need to know about Lawton," he tells her quietly.

She just nods. "You should tell Bailey," she replies. "Not _everything_, but that you saw her and some of the things she said about him wanting to send her to boarding school. If he knows what the problem is, he might be able to see things from her view and understand why she left."

Or he'll blame himself even more. "I'll think about it," John says, even though he has no intention of doing any such thing. Thankfully, Sam and Bailey arrive back before Rachel can call him on it, and then there's a flurry of Jack-related casework to be handled that distracts everyone.

  
*

  
Three weeks after Lawton, the pictures arrive.

Jack's been disturbingly quiet since the message in Sam's office, and she's been understandably on edge, waiting for the next strike. Nobody expected the next strike to be completely unrelated to Sam, though. A nondescript envelope arrived Thursday morning in the mail, addressed to Bailey, and it was put aside with other paperwork to be handled after their current case.

The next morning, John receives an identical envelope, and bored out of his mind with writing a concluding report, he opens it right away for the distraction. Pictures of Frannie spill out on his desk, Frannie eating at an outdoor café in a swimsuit and sarong, Frannie leaving a store with shopping bags, telephoto pictures of Frannie in her hotel room, filing her nails or sprawled on the bed, on her cell phone.

The note attached reads simply, in Jack's trademark red ink and scrawl, "I know where she is. Do you?"

John's out of his chair, shouting for Rachel, Sam, Bailey, _somebody_ before he even realizes it.

All three plus Grace come rushing out of Bailey's office into the bullpen, and Bailey goes stark, bone white the instant he sees the pictures. He looks like he might pass out when Sam notices the note and hands it to him. Rachel's the one who takes action, carefully flipping over the envelope without getting her own prints on it, and she says, "No postmark. He was in the building to deliver this."

It's Sam who orders the building lockdown. Rachel who searches Bailey's mail and finds a similar envelope. Sam and Grace handle Bailey, and Rachel commandeers half his desk to compare the photos, absently giving him names and landmarks to track down. With Bailey safely out of hearing distance, she turns to him and says, "She'll be fine, John."

"Obviously, you're not familiar with Jack's work," John snaps, sorting through photos, trying to find identifying characteristics that weren't so general and vague they were unusable. "We have to find her."

"You've done it before," she comments, sorting through her own set of photos much more calmly. Abruptly, she drops the photo in her hands. "You had George searching for a cell phone?"

"Yeah, he didn't come up with anything."

"No, John, why would she need a cell phone unless she was keeping in contact with somebody?" Rachel's dialing George, telling him to bring his laptop, and she looks back at John with something akin to excitement. "She has a sister, right? A little sister?"

"Arianna," John sits up. "Arianna won't talk to Bailey about Frannie."

"Maybe because she knows where Frannie is?" Rachel pushes herself out of her chair. "We need to talk to the sister. If they care about each other enough to keep in contact, she'll care enough to help us find Frannie before Jack can get to her."

  
*

  
Arianna, John discovers, has _earned_ the nickname of miniature Frances.

Bailey and Sam are arguing with Bailey's ex-wife, Janet, about the necessity of questioning her thirteen year old when the thirteen year old in question breezes out of her room, one earphone of her iPod in her ear and the other hanging down, presumably so she can hear the arguing. "Hold it!" Janet Malone calls, and Arianna doesn't pay the slightest attention, sorting through the keys in the dish. "Where do you think you're going?"

"My pimp gets testy when I'm late, and I need the money for drugs."

Rachel barely stifles a laugh, which earns her a glare from Janet and a genuine smile from Arianna. Arianna stops short when she catches sight of him, studying him thoroughly, and he feels vaguely like a bug on exhibit. "Arianna," Sam tries gently. "We need to talk to you about your sister."

"She should be back from marrying that drug-runner that knocked her up," Arianna says off-handedly, and Bailey winces while Janet rolls her eyes. "I keep telling her that South America is no place to have a kid, but she swears Columbia is great this time of year."

"Arianna," Bailey attempts. "Frances could be in danger."

"She's used to it, trust me," Arianna snaps. "Not like she had anybody around to protect her before."

That rings a warning bell somewhere in his head, but Rachel's looking at Arianna herself as she asks, "Can John and I speak to you in private, please?"

And being treated like an adult seems to be what makes the difference. That, and the fact her mother vehemently and loudly opposes such a private meeting. "Sure," Arianna says carelessly, inclining her head toward her room. "But you're going to have to make it snappy. Withdrawls are a total bitch."

He follows Rachel into the room, letting her take the lead since he's never been good with kids. She doesn't comment on the decor the way Sam would to put the girl at ease, she jumps right into the reason they're there. "Arianna, yesterday we received some photos of your sister. They were taken by a serial killer who tends to target the VCTF."

Arianna pales, for the first time looking her age. "Pictures of what?"

"Her going out for lunch, shopping," Rachel says gently. "But there were also pictures of her inside her hotel room. She probably doesn't know she's in any danger, and we need to get her somewhere safe until this threat has been dealt with."

There's a few seconds where Arianna is silent, but she suddenly gets up and roots around under her bed, withdrawing a box. A box with a false bottom. A box with a false bottom that's concealing a cell phone, and John has to give Rachel points for calling that one. Arianna picks up the phone, presses one key, and holds it up to her ear. "Where are you?" she asks, her voice trembling. She turns to the side slightly, lowering her voice. "Bailey's guys are here. They say you're in danger." Pause, and Arianna turns around to look at them. "A redhead and a cute guy. Oh my god! He's the one you weren't describing!"

Rachel turns to look at him, raising an eyebrow, and Arianna winces at whatever her sister says. "Sorry, sorry! Okay. But they said-- Okay. You're really-- Okay, hang on."

Arianna hands him the phone with a knowing smirk that, coming from a thirteen year old, makes him extremely uncomfortable. "Frannie?"

"What the _fuck_ do you think you're doing?" she sounds much, much more pissed than he's ever heard her. "My _baby sister_? The _fuck_, John? If you can't find me yourself--"

"You're in danger," he cuts her off, heading across the small room to give himself some modicum of privacy, even though Arianna clearly knows what happened between them. "I'm not just trying to scare your sister into giving you up, for Christ's sake. Jack sent us pictures of you. Inside your hotel room."

Silence, and Frannie actually sounds a little nervous. "Where?"

"We don't know. Looked like somewhere close to a beach."

"Miami," she says with a relieved sigh. "I'm not there anymore."

"I don't give a fuck where you are, you need to come back to Atlanta."

"Because I'm safer closer to the serial killer? That makes sense. Oh, no, wait -- it doesn't."

"He might not be in Atlanta. He might be trailing you," John lies, and from the silence on the other end of the line, he knows Frannie believes the lie. He lowers his voices, pleads softly, "Don't make me waste time looking for you. Just tell me where you are so we can get this sorted out."

Finally, she says, "I'll be fine. Don't worry."

"Frannie!

But she's already hung up on him, and he sighs in frustration as he snaps the phone closed. Turns around, and Arianna's studying him again. Tentatively, she asks, "This isn't just some bullshit routine to make her go back?"

"No," John says. "Your father has the pictures in his briefcase."

Arianna nods, looking at him thoughtfully, twisting her hair between her fingers. "If I were you, I might look at the contact info for that call on my cell phone," she says softly, and he sees right away what she's doing, following her instructions. He writes down the phone number, makes note of the fact the contact is listed as 'Sasha'. When he silently hands her back the phone, she looks up at him, big brown eyes wide with anxiety. "The name that cell phone is registered to, search business licenses in L.A., Miami, and New York City. Don't send Bailey or the blonde chick, she'll know the instant they're near her."

He nods, writes his and Rachel's numbers down, handing them to Arianna. "Call her every hour. I know that you know where she is -- if she doesn't answer or something feels wrong, call one of us, any number, any time."

Looking down at the paper, Arianna asks softly, "This guy, the killer? Is he a rapist?"

And that makes John stop cold, because that question is far too focused and meaningful for a thirteen year old to ask without reason. Rachel's expression mirrors his, and she tells the girl firmly, "No. He's a lot of things, but we've never connected him to any kind of sexual crime."

"Okay," Arianna exhales slowly, nodding, then repeats it again, like she's trying to convince herself. "Okay. If she doesn't know that, don't tell her," she says directly to John. "She'll go with you if she thinks... Just don't tell her, 'kay? And keep her safe?"

"We will," Rachel takes her hand, smiles reassuringly. Her expression changes instantly, and John doesn't even have time to consider what she might be thinking when she asks, "Would you like to come to Atlanta with us to wait for her?"

Arianna's eyes go wide. "Really?"

"I don't think Bailey'll take much convincing," Rachel tells her honestly. "Your mom--"

"-will just have to fucking deal," Arianna grins, bouncing off the bed and out into the living room. "Hey, Mom, I'm going to Atlanta!"

"Call George and get the searches running," Rachel smiles at him as a rather loud 'the hell you are!' echoes into the room. "I'll go deal with the fallout from this."

  
*

  
The Inferno is apparently one of the hottest clubs in New York City.

It's one of three jointly owned by Robert LeDeux and Alessandra O'Dell, the others being The Paradiso in Miami and The Purgatorio in Los Angeles, both of which are doing pretty well in their own right. When Arianna wanders by his desk, she idly points out that the snow in New York City is nice this time of year, loudly enough that it's undoubtedly meant more for the person she's on the phone with than him, and tosses her cell at him with a knowing smirk. Lifting it to his ear, he guesses, "Frannie?"

"I'm going to kill her," Frannie sighs in frustration. "Jesus fuck, what did you people tell her? And why are you still there?"

"We're not there, she's here," John sighs and scrubs a hand over his eyes. "You're in New York?"

"Not for long."

"Frannie--"

"Oh, chill out. I'm at the fucking airport waiting for boarding. It's not like I can get much done with Ree calling me every twenty minutes," she sounds nearly as annoyed as he feels at the moment. "I'm not going to your headquarters. I'm not going within three blocks of dear old Dad. Take it or leave it, John, and you know I can disappear before you figure out a way to track me."

Shit, he should've expected that. "Fine. You'll stay with me."

Silence for a few long seconds, and she says, "Fine."

"Good."

If talking on the phone with her is this uncomfortable, having her in his apartment for an indeterminate length of time is going to be a trip to Disneyland. She hangs up on him, again, without saying goodbye.

Yeah, this is going to work _stunningly_ well.


	5. I hate to be denied. How you hurt my pride. I feel pushed aside.

Frannie hasn't booked a flight under her own name in over a year. It makes her anxious and uncomfortable to have to go anywhere as herself anymore, but she doesn't need the FBI finding out about any more of characters when it's not necessary. She spends the majority of the flight making absurdly expensive phone calls to Bobby until he finally tells her that he'll just meet her in Atlanta after he gets a few things worked out at Purgatorio.

Miami and New York are handled by extremely competant managers with Frannie checking in on them every few months, but the L.A. club has always been Bobby's baby, and nobody else is ever left in charge there for more than a couple weeks.

Funny how all of Bobby's minor vacations relate to her somehow.

Stepping off the plane, the first thing she hears is a familiar squeal of, "Sasha!" It gives her about three seconds warning to brace herself before Arianna's wrapped around her, a bundle of excitement going a thousand miles a minute, and she asks, "Jesus, did somebody give you coffee and sugar?"

Arianna rolls her eyes. "Right, 'cause I can't possibly be excited 'cause I haven't seen you in forever."

"Exaggerate much? You saw me two months ago for your birthday," Frannie teases, covertly scanning the crowd for a surprise attack from a serial killer. Or her father. She honestly thinks she'd prefer the serial killer. "Who brought you?"

"That would be me," a tall redhead steps forward. "Rachel Burke."

"Rachel's _so_ cool," Arianna says emphatically. High praise from a thirteen year old who also happens to be a Malone child. "She convinced Mom to let me come. Oh my god, Sash, you should've seen it. Mom was all, 'The last child I let Bailey take hasn't been seen in a year,' and Dad was all, 'You have no room to be talking,' and Rachel just had to _look_ at them and say that she knew they were both good parents and wanted me to be safe, and bam! I'm on a plane to Atlanta."

"Sounds like quite an achievement."

And the redhead, Rachel, seems to sense Frannie's caution. "John asked me to drop you off at his place."

It's somewhere between a statement and a question, like she doesn't want to assume Frannie agreed to staying there. Or maybe she's just worried about what'll happen if she lets Frannie out of her sight. Whatever it is, it doesn't really matter in the end. "Fine," Frannie agrees politely. Arianna clearly likes the woman, so there's no need to be rude about her distrust -- besides, anyone with half a brain can tell that Frannie trusts the FBI about as far as she could throw them.

She lets Ree chatter on throughout the entire ride to cover how anxious she really is, and she hates that her parents still have this kind of control over her. Being in the same city with one of them makes her so damn nervous and concerned about taking half a step in the wrong direction that she worries herself sick and ends up fucking herself over completely in her haste to be what they seem to want.

"Okay, Arianna, this is your stop," Rachel smiles at Arianna, not too bright or cheerful or in any way obviously fake. Thankfully, Rachel doesn't dawdle in front of Bailey's house or try to stall things until Daddy Dearest can come out and harass her. As she pulls the car away, she tells Frannie, "If you're uncomfortable with the idea of staying with John, my door is open. Staying with a stranger probably isn't much better, but I figured I'd throw it out there just in case."

"Thanks," Frannie says noncomittally. "We'll see how it goes with John."

Assuming it goes at all, she thinks.

Rachel gives her the key to John's apartment and drops her off in front of the building after securing a promise that Frannie wouldn't leave the apartment until John got there. The fact the woman actually believed Frannie would keep her word on that just proves how new she is to the FBI.

Being in John's apartment is the worst kind of nostalgia.

_I would rather live on the streets._

_Come here, sit down._

_You suck, John._

For lack of anything else to do waiting for John to get home, she decides to cook him dinner. It's not a particularly easy task since his kitchen only contains a bag of flour with some species of bugs crawling in it, a case of beer, a bottle of _really_ good scotch, three eggs, half a gallon of milk, a box of baking soda that's probably been there since he moved in, and six cartons of Chinese takeout. Instead of breaking her promise and leaving, she uses John's computer, which she thinks he only owns to look at porn, to order groceries at Safeway.com for delivery.

Then curses when, on further inspection, she discovers that John doesn't own pots or pans.

Since it obviously wasn't meant to be, she gives up and orders a pizza.

She's on her second slice, and her fourth of John's beers when he finally arrives home, and he stops short when he sees her. In an entirely odd tone of voice, he asks, "You ordered a pizza?"

"No. I ordered a male stripper. The pizza was a prop."

Okay, so that was a little more sarcastic than she probably needed to be. John just shakes his head, drops his keys on the side table, and mutters to himself. "All this, and she's going to get herself killed by a pizza delivery guy."

"_She's_ still sitting right here," she rolls her eyes. "And you're lucky _she_ didn't just bail when she got a load of whatever's living in your refrigerator."

"There's nothing living in the refrigerator," he tells her firmly as he sets his gun next to his keys and shrugs off his jacket. Then, rakes a hand through his hair and concedes, "But open the oven at your own risk."

"I'll keep that in mind." She takes another drink of her beer and looks at him, and okay, she's not drunk enough that this entirely comfortable, but it could definitely stand to be more awkward. And being Frannie Malone again, well, Frannie lives to make awkward situations even more awkward. "So. Was it good for you, too?"

His gaze snaps to her, at a total loss, and she can't help but giggle at the deer-in-headlights expression on his face. He smiles, nods a couple times and drops himself into the armchair across from her. His voice is lower as he looks her up and down. "Yeah, yeah it was."

And she's never been turned on by a single look like that before.

Then, he looks away and starts, "Frannie..." and that tone of voice has never been good. She just rolls her eyes at him again, and starts searching her purse for her cell phone. "Look, this whole Jack thing, it wasn't just a con to get you back here."

_That's_ what he's worried about? "I kind of figured."

"Why?" he narrows his eyes, and the fact that he gets suspicious about her lack of suspicion makes her want to both laugh and run for the hills, because he just knows her too damn well.

She probably shouldn't have brought it up in the first place. Sighing, she hands him a beer. "You may want to drink this first."

"Oh, Christ," John says, taking the beer and blindly slouching back. "What?"

"Well, I had an FBI agent drop by my hotel room while I was out," she tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear. Anxious habit. Tell, damn it. And she was doing so well. "Left a message saying he was sorry he missed me."

"We didn't ask the New York office to talk to you."

John's clearly quite confused, so she steels herself and tells him, "The agent was named Jack O. Trades."

His expression cycles through disbelief, horror, and into anger in the span of a couple seconds, which she might find more amusing if he didn't push himself out of the chair to start pacing. He starts a couple sentences, but never gets past the first syllables, which just can't be a good sign, and he finally stops, staring at her. "I'm not leaving you alone. Ever again."

"Good to see you're not going to overreact about this."

"God damn it, Frances, do you have the slightest fucking clue how much danger you're in?"

Rolling her eyes probably isn't the most practical thing to do, but she does it anyway. "I don't know. Less than Samantha Waters? More than the pizza delivery guy?" At the expression on his face, she adds, "Actually, I think you're more likely to strangle me right now than Jack is, so maybe I should take my chances."

He glares at her. Opens his mouth, pauses for a second, and apparently decides against saying whatever he was thinking. Instead, he turns around, stalks into his bedroom, and slams the door behind himself.

Half a second later, he opens the door to yell, "Don't even _think_ about going anywhere," and slams it shut again.

"Well, this was a great idea," she tells herself sarcastically.

On the plus side? She still has his beer and the rest of the pizza to herself.

  
*

  
The letter from her father appears on the coffee table the next morning.

She doesn't notice it at first, since she's a little busy plotting John's murder after discovering he locked her in his apartment from outside the door somehow. She spends the better part of an hour searching for a way out and learns that he doesn't have a fire escape-- which is just stupid for someone living on the third floor-- and jumping out the windows will only be an option if she wants to test her ability to walk with a broken leg.

As revenge, she drops every white shirt he owns in the laundry with a pair of red boxers, reprograms his computer with parental controls that won't let him _near_ porn, and sprays her most feminine, flowery, sweet-scented perfume on everything in his bedroom.

When she does finally notice the letter, part of her is grateful that John waited to give it to her until he wouldn't be around to see her reaction to it. The other part? Is blindly enraged that he'd consider giving it to her in the first place. She doesn't touch it all morning, avoiding it about as well as she'd be able to avoid a purple elephant singing show tunes in the middle of the living room.

At 1:30 in the afternoon, she opens the envelope.

Crumples up the two sheets of paper inside without even looking at them and dumps them in the trash can.

At 1:45, she retrieves the crumpled up ball and smoothes the pages out on the coffee table. Folds them precisely back the way they were and stuffs them back into the envelope without reading them.

Does it three more times, and finally drops the pages, envelope and all, into the trash can, lighting a match over them. The match burns down to the tips of fingers, and somehow she just can't bring herself to drop it into the trash can and end this madness. Finally, she calls her sister and opens the conversation with, "Tell me what a fucking moron I'm being."

"You're a fucking moron," Arianna obliges. "Is there something specific you want me to insult you about, or is this just a general thing? 'Cause I've got lots of general insults. Most of them are more insulting to Mom, actually, but where's the downside in that?"

"How are you liking staying with Dad?"

Arianna's silence is telling. After a few seconds, she says, "Beats staying with Mom."

"Until he gets sick of you and tries to ship you off to boarding school, too."

"Wow, thanks for that wonderful assessment of what living with me is like."

"That's not what I meant," Frannie sighs, twisting her hair between her fingers and too stressed and anxious to care that it's a tell. She drops down onto the couch, staring wearily at the trash can. "Just... don't get your hopes up about anything. He may act like he wants you around, but it's all just an act."

"Have you been listening to Mom again?" At Frannie's disgusted sigh, Arianna hurries to say, "I'm sorry, okay? It's just, well, I don't know Dad. Not really. I don't have childhood memories like you do, and I just... Just let me have this for a little while, okay? Even if it is all just an act, I want some of those memories you got to have."

"I don't want you having some of my memories," Frannie tells her. "I hate it when you cry."

"I know," Arianna pauses. "It's how I always win arguments with you."

"Brat," Frannie says affectionately. "Don't get your hopes up. And call me when it all goes to shit."

"Don't I always?"

Hanging up, Frannie stares at the trash can for a few more minutes before she finally sighs and pulls the envelope back out. Plain, white, business envelope with her name scrawled on the front in her father's distinctive chicken-scratch handwriting. She doesn't have to look at the pages inside to know they're probably covered with the same writing, all of it designed to fool her into thinking...

God, why does she do this to herself?

Her cell phone ringing startles her so badly that she drops the envelope and jumps a good foot off the couch before she shakes her head at herself and picks it up. Caller unknown. The number is Atlanta-based, so she figures it's got to be one of her father's drones and answers it. "Yeah?"

"Little Frances Malone," a scratchy voice on the other end says with a mocking undertone. "Now, why would you be so jumpy?"

Oh. _Fuck_.

Vaulting off the couch, she checks the lock on the front door as the serial killer on the phone laughs at her and says, "Colder." Shit. Peers out the windows through the blinds, and Jack says, "Warmer," and her heart skips a few beats until she realizes that John doesn't have a balcony or a fire escape or anything else that somebody could climb up to get into the apartment.

She fakes confidence as she asks in a sultry tone, "Am I very hot?"

He laughs again, sounding the slightest bit surprised at her temerity. Laughing is actually one of the better reactions she's received to her temerity lately. "You certainly are. Did you enjoy your gift?"

Right. The thing she _forgot_ to tell John about. "Sure. What girl doesn't love getting pictures of herself sleeping? And you even got my good side."

"It's hard to find the bad side of a woman who sleeps nude," he replies with a low chuckle. And yes, she's in _so_ much trouble now. "But I was talking about the gift I left for you this morning."

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_. She casts a few furtive glances around the apartment and asks, "And what gift might that be?" With mock-excitement, she adds, "Please say Marky Mark CD, _please_ say Marky Mark CD..."

"Little Fran, you amuse me," he says, and she vaguely wonders if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Then he continues, "I left your gift under your pillow."

Her breath catches, and she can't bring herself to care that he probably hears that little sign she's not as unflappable as she pretends to be, because he left something under her _pillow_. Which she was _sleeping_ on last night. She moves to the couch slowly, hoping that her knees don't cave out from under her, and out of sheer habit, tucks the cell phone between her shoulder and her ear as she bends to pull the pillow up.

The envelope is beige, larger than the one John left for her, and her fingers tremble as she opens it.

Pictures scatter out over the coffee table, and for a few seconds, her brain can't quite comprehend what it is that she's seeing. When she does register what she's seeing, she drops the phone to the sound of laughter on the other end, pressing a hand to her mouth and swallowing back nausea.

She's never seen pictures of a corpse before, much less a corpse she used to know.

She's definitely going to be sick.

  
*

  
It takes her a little while to get herself calmed down and back in control. It also takes a somewhat hysterical phone call to Bobby, who promises to be on the next flight out of LAX, and having the biggest knife John owns in her hand at all times. She carefully picks up the pictures by the corners and stuffs them back into the envelope, setting it out of sight in the kitchen, and finally feels like she has enough control of herself to call her sister. "Where are you?" she asks as soon as Arianna picks up.

"At the FBI headquarters," Arianna answers. "You wouldn't--"

"Who did you tell?" Frannie cuts her off abruptly.

Silence, and the fact that Arianna doesn't have to ask her what she's talking about confirms it. "Why?"

"Who?!"

"My new school counselor," Arianna admits, sounding frightened. "But he promised--"

"Find the redhead, the one you trust, and put her on the fucking phone."

"Sash, I'm sorry--"

"I'm not mad!" Frannie snaps, and okay, maybe she wasn't in control enough to deal with this yet. Taking a deep breath, she deliberately softens her voice and tries again. "I'm not mad at you, Arianna. I wish you would've talked to me before you did this, but I'm not mad. Just get the redhead."

Silence, and she hears the buzz of people in the background before an older voice asks, "Hello? Frances?"

"Do not let my sister out of your sight. Actually, don't let her leave the building."

"What's going on?" the redhead asks calmly.

"I'm not the only one Jack made contact with," Frannie says as she glances around the apartment again, fingers tightening around the knife. "He was posing as her new school counselor. He didn't threaten her, so she didn't realize anything was wrong. He got into John's apartment this morning and left me some pictures. Under my pillow."

There's a long pause on the other end. "John's on his way back to pick you up. Make sure the doors and windows are locked."

"Of course they're locked. He locked me in."

She can hear the soft tone of voice as the redhead speaks to someone else, and when she returns, she can't quite hide the alarm in her voice. "Frances, there's an A.P.D. cruiser a few blocks from you that'll be there in a couple minutes. John's on his way now."

"Why?" Frannie snorts. "You think Jack's going to try to break in again knowing you're on the way?"

"John didn't lock you in the apartment."

Opens her mouth, but she can't quite find any words. "Oh-- okay."

Everything after hearing that kind of blurs, and by the time she blinks, she's sitting on the couch between two local cops who can't possibly be much older than she is as John comes barrelling through the door like he thinks Jack's still there. "Nice entrance," she tells him, but she sounds more stunned than sarcastic, even to herself.

John's in front of her like lightning, hands touching her face as he looks her over. "Are you okay?"

"Been better," she says quietly, letting him continue because it's almost comforting how he tucks her hair behind her ear, fingers stroking along the line of her jaw. "Been worse, too."

That doesn't appear to make him feel better. "Where are the pictures?"

"Kitchen."

He disappears for a few minutes, and she's grateful he doesn't bring the pictures back out to look at them in front of her. When he does come back, he's got the envelope in an evidence bag and his face is grim as he thanks the officers for staying with her.

Her cell phone rings again, and her gasp is an inverted scream as she jumps. John spends all of three seconds assessing her expression before he grabs the phone and answers it. "Yes?" Pause. "Who is this?" Shorter pause, and he looks at her. "Bobby?"

She leaps off the couch to take the phone from him. "Where are you?"

"About to board the plane," Bobby tells her, sounding worried out of his mind. "Who was that? Are you okay?"

"Yeah, that was John," she melts back into the couch, closes her eyes as the sound of Bobby's voice soothes her. "And I'll be better when you get here."

"What's going on, Baby?"

"I don't want to do this over the phone," she tells him, pinching the bridge of her nose to ward off the headache she feels coming on. "I have a feeling I'm not going to be leaving the FBI headquarters for a while, so call when you land and I'll get Ree's new best friend to give you directions."

"Hang tight, Kid," Bobby says softly. "I'll be there soon, okay?"

"Yeah. Just hurry."

"Love you, Doll."

"Love you, too." When she ends the call and opens her eyes, John is staring at her with a really strange expression on his face. "What?"

He looks like he desperately wants to interrogate her about the call, but to her surprise, he just says, "We should get back to the Command Center. C.S.I. is on their way and they get touchy about us being in the way."

She nods and starts to follow him, but doubles back suddenly toward the kitchen. When she returns with his bottle of scotch, he just raises an eyebrow. "Oh, come on," she rolls her eyes. "I'll bet you a hundred bucks this is going to become necessary within an hour of me getting there."

"Necessary for who?"

"Everyone." She gives the bottle a measured look and adds, "We better stop at the liquor store."

  
*

  
Arianna's damn near hysterical by the time Frannie gets there.

"I'm _so_ sorry, I'm so, so, _so_ sorry," Arianna sobs miserably, arms wrapped tightly around herself, despite the redhead's apparent best efforts to comfort her. Frannie sighs heavily and hands John her bag, making her way into the redhead's office and seating herself on the coffee table directly in front of her little sister. "I didn't know. I didn't mean to--"

"Shh," Frannie reaches out, opens her arms, and Arianna throws herself into them. "It's okay. I know."

"See," the redhead strokes Arianna's hair in a comforting gesture. "She doesn't hate you. Everything's going to be fine, Arianna."

"Hate you?" Frannie sighs again, rubbing her sister's back. "Don't be melodramatic. If I didn't hate you for that mess with the science experiment in the bathtub that we're _never_ going to speak of again, nothing's going to make me hate you."

That gets a tearful giggle out of Arianna. "I didn't mean to blow up your--"

"Never speak of again," Frannie cuts her off with a smile. Looking to the redhead, she asks, "Where's," slightest pause as she chokes on the words, "Our father?"

"In his office," the redhead answers as she starts to get up. "Where John and I will be, if you'll excuse us. Arianna, I'll be back in a bit once we convince your father you won't fall apart explaining how you met your new school counselor."

Arianna grins at the redhead; this is clearly an inside joke that Frannie's not a part of, and that annoys her the tiniest bit, because Arianna doesn't trust adults easily, especially adults connected in any way to either of their parents. When the redhead closes the door behind herself, Frannie asks, "You trust her?"

"Yeah," Arianna nods. Then, unsure, adds, "But turns out my judgement's not so good lately."

Frannie exhales slowly. "We'll get back to that one. What have you told them?"

"Rachel and Dad's guys? Nothing. Once Rachel said that Mr. Jackson was actually the killer guy, I was crying too hard for them to question me." Arianna looks up, wide eyes bright with tears. "I didn't mean to tell him. He was just so nice and understanding, and he said I could trust him..."

"Rule number one of the real world, kiddo," Frannie says wryly. "When somebody says, 'You can trust me'? It's a real good indication that you can't. It's right up there with people who start sentences with 'honestly' indicating they're about to lie to you."

Arianna keeps her gaze rooted to the floor, and Frannie reaches out to tilt her chin upward. Softly, Frannie asks, "How did you even get on the subject?"

"There was this field trip and some guys were playing pranks, and they locked me in this little, dark room," Arianna shivers, and now it's all starting to gel in Frannie's head, because this is the one fear she'd never been able to get Ree over. "I freaked out. Bad. The teacher figured out I was claustrophobic, and she said she wouldn't tell Mom how bad I freaked out if I went and talked to the new counselor about it. So, I went, and I figured I'd just B.S. my way out of it like you would, but he was so nice and he didn't question me about anything at all--"

"And you volunteered the information," Frannie shakes her head. "Okay. Here's what we're going to tell them. You went to see him, and you started talking about how much you missed me and how you were worried about me being out there by myself. Somewhere in the course of these conversations, you mentioned that I was in New York."

"That's all?"

"That's all," Frannie confirms. "If they ask why you were sent to the counselor, tell them about the claustrophobia since they'll find that out from your teacher, anyway, but don't tell them why. You don't know why you're claustrophobic; you've hated small spaces for as long as you can remember."

"Okay."

"Do not _ever_ mention--"

"I won't," Arianna promises. "I swear."

Frannie glances toward the door and the windows overlooking the bustle of activity outside the room. "You know you can talk to me if you need to?"

"You don't like talking about it."

"I--" cuts herself off and tries another tactic. "I'm past it. You're not. That's probably my fault--"

"No, no," Arianna rushes to interrupt. "It's not your fault. I just," she falters, looking very, very young all of the sudden, and Frannie hates herself a little for putting her sister through this. "I'm sorry."

"For what?" Frannie asks in surprise. "You've got nothing to be sorry about."

"If I'd done something," Arianna's voice is barely above a whisper. "I let it happen."

"Oh, Ree, no." Frannie definitely hates herself, now. Leaning forward, she hugs her sister close. "You were just a little kid. There's nothing you could have done."

"I could have told Mom."

"If I couldn't, what makes you think you should've?"

"He wasn't hurting _me_," Arianna says meaningfully. "You protected me."

"Obviously not as well as I should have," Frannie sighs. Cutting off Arianna's protests, she says, "Ree, don't blame yourself, okay? It wasn't our fault, it shouldn't have happened, but it did, and we've got to deal with it. That'll be easier now that he's dead."

Arianna pulls back abruptly. "What?"

"Oh. Right. You didn't know about that." Frannie closes her eyes against Arianna's stunned look and massages her temples. God, she needs a drink. And a cigarette. Copious amounts of both, actually. "Seems you made an impression on your guidance counselor and he felt compelled to take care of the problem."

"He killed him?" Arianna's expression suddenly hardens. "Good. I hope he took his time."

"For the love of Christ, don't say that in front of anybody else," Frannie says tiredly. "Except Bobby. You can talk to him when he gets here, about anything, if you want. He should only be a couple hours. We'll have to get the redhead to give him directions from the airport."

"How'd you know?" Arianna asks tentatively. Frannie opens one eye and looks at her, confused, so she clarifies, "How'd you know that Bobby was different? That we could trust him?"

"That's a story you're still too young to hear. And I'm still too embarrassed to tell, I think."

"Was it sex?"

"God, no," Frannie laughs. "Bobby and I aren't like that. Besides, he dated _Mom_."

"That's not exactly a good endorsement."

"Yeah, well, it's hard to find decent guys who aren't much older than I am," Frannie snipes for her own benefit. "Luckily for us, Bobby's good-looking, young-ish, and rich. How could she possibly pass that up?"

  
*

  
Bobby leans against the doorway, duffel bag still hanging over his shoulder as he favors her with a small smile. She just grins back at him before launching herself off the couch. "Hey, you," she hugs him tightly, burying her face against his chest. "God, it's good to have you here."

"You scared the hell out of me," he rebukes gently, his arms tightening around her as his chin rests atop her head. After a minute, he pulls back and guides her toward the couch. "I haven't heard you sound like that in a long time. You gonna tell me what happened?"

The story spills out rushed and kind of haphazard, and she finds herself skipping over some things only to remember them when she's well into the next part; the whole thing ends up so disjointed that she's not sure she's making any sense at all. She finally trails off, and Bobby strokes the stubble on his chin, nodding thoughtfully. "You do realize that you manage to attract more trouble--"

"You know, I _was_ starting to get bored," she deliberately widens her eyes with mock-innocence, but makes her tone as sarcastic as she possibly can. "I figured getting a serial killer interested in me might spice things up."

He pretends not to notice the sarcasm. "You couldn't have just dragged me to Disneyland again?"

"Oh, wait a minute," she laughs, holding her hands up. "_I_ dragged _you_ to Disneyland? Who was the one who insisted on doing the Pirates of the Carribbean ride _six_ times?"

"You were. You and your Johnny Depp fixation," he lies, grinning when she laughs at him again. Then he turns more serious, takes her hand and asks quietly, "How're you holding up, Kid?"

Sighs heavily and presses the heels of her hands against her eyes to keep from rubbing them and smearing her makeup. She shakes her head softly, "Everything's such a fucking mess. I'm a horrible person and I don't even care."

"You're not a horrible person."

"I'm happy that somebody died a most likely painful, horrifying death. They're not going to cannonize me."

Glances up in time to catch Bobby literally biting his tongue, and probably counting to ten, too. Maybe even twenty -- he's fond of telling her that ten seconds isn't enough for most of her problems. "They're not going to blame you, either," he finally says. "You ever consider telling them the truth?"

"No."

"Well, don't take your time or anything."

"Shut up. I've told everybody I trust," she rolls her eyes. He merely raises an eyebrow, and she sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose and wincing. "Oh, not the trust lecture, please. How many times are we going to have _this_ conversation."

"As many as it takes for you to _hear_ it."

"Hey, I tried the trust thing with my Dad when you told me to, and look what happened there!"

"Don't try that with me," he shakes his head, giving her an exasperated look. "You never tried trusting him. You went in thinking he'd abandon you, and you did everything possible to make it happen." Before she can even open her mouth to protest, he's holding up a hand to cut her off. "You know I'm right. You do this to everybody."

"Yeah, and everybody takes off," she folds her arms over her chest defensively. "You're the only one that stuck around."

He sighs heavily and scrubs his hands over his face. "You are so fucking stubborn."

It's said with affection, she knows, so she just smirks at him. "You still love me."


	6. This kind of loneliness, it's way too hard.

John is _not_ jealous of whoever the hell Frannie's been locked in Rachel's office talking to for the last hour. No, he's really not. What reason would he possibly have to be jealous? "Arianna says they're just friends." He whirls around to find Rachel smirking at him. "You've been staring at that door ever since it closed."

"Have not," John mutters, turning his attention back to the sealed evidence bags containing the pictures Jack sent Frannie. "What else did Arianna say?" Before Rachel can get out any taunting remarks, he amends, "About the case?"

"She doesn't know who the victim in the pictures might be." He almost admires how Rachel can switch from the sassy, teasing friend to the focused profiler almost instantaneously. "Sam and I agree that showing her the pictures wouldn't help any. It's more likely Frances knew the victim."

"No, she would've said--" And John cuts himself off abruptly, because Frannie has never been one to volunteer information about anything. Unless it'll get her something she's after. "Are Sam and Bailey getting anywhere with the I.D. on the guy?"

"Not yet," Rachel shakes her head and takes the seat across from his desk. "The body hasn't turned up."

"Yes, it has," Sam interrupts quietly, looking exhausted and drained. "Baltimore P.D. just called. Jack left the body in Janet's living room."

"Bailey's ex-wife?" John clarifies, surprised. "This is all about Bailey."

"No. Janet recognized the victim," Sam hands John a file, which Rachel immediately gets up to look over his shoulder at. Vincent Salvatori, aged thirty-nine, an investment banker with a habit of speeding and double-parking. "One of her ex-boyfriends. She told Bailey she hasn't seen him in three or four years."

None of it is making any sense to John. When Jack has gone after the VCTF in the past, it was always immediate family, people whose connections were obvious. What would Jack possibly have to gain by killing a guy that was sleeping with Bailey's ex-wife four years ago? Sliding his chair back, he heads for Rachel's office, file in hand with Rachel and Sam on his heels, and tells Frannie, "You didn't tell us that you knew the victim."

She looks up from the man holding her hand, annoyed, and snaps, "Excuse me?"

Tossing the file on the coffee table in front of her, he says, "Vincent Salvatori. Your mom's ex."

There's a brief instant where something shows on her face before her expression turns deliberately blank. She doesn't even look at the file on the table. "I didn't recognize the guy. My mom's got a lot of exes, though. It might be easier to narrow down who Paris Hilton has slept with."

The man groans and puts his head in his hands.

John starts to say something, but Rachel abruptly yanks on the back of his jacket, pulling him out of the room as she thanks Frances and shuts the door. "She's lying," John tells the two women in front of him, certain. "She knows exactly who that guy is. I'd lay odds she knows why Jack went after him, too."

"Maybe," Rachel says noncommitally. "But it doesn't seem likely she's going to talk to you about it."

Sam looks back and forth between them for a few seconds and sighs. "Oh, John. You slept with her?"

John starts with surprise, "It was a long time ago, at Quantico--"

"Not me, Nimrod!" Rachel rolls her eyes, exasperated. "She meant Frances!"

Sam looks like she's trying very hard not to laugh as she shakes her head. "Frances doesn't trust any of us. It's unlikely she'll talk even if she does know anything," she focuses back on the case, although the corner of her mouth is quirked upward. "Rachel, maybe you should try questioning Arianna again. John and I'll see what Bailey's learned from Janet."

Rachel nods and heads for the conference room, where Arianna's been hanging out with George's spare laptop since they finished their first round of questioning. Sam raises an eyebrow and tells him, "Let's not mention to Bailey why Frances is so eager to make you miserable."

John just groans as he follows her toward Bailey's office.

  
*

  
By the time Grace returns with the body to start the autopsy, John is certain of two things. First, that Frannie is lying about not knowing the victim, and second, that she's got her sister lying about it, too. Arianna's not nearly as good a liar as Frannie is, but she's far from bad at it. There's nothing obviously false, and most of her lies are probably omissions.

Rachel refuses to let anyone even suggest to the girl that she's lying, though, so they're obviously not going to get very far with learning the truth there. Bailey's conversation with his ex-wife apparently didn't give them any kind of a possible motive, either, so they're back at square one.

Grace's autopsy doesn't give them any suggestions about why Jack would choose this particular ex-boyfriend of Janet's, but it does turn up one rather gruesome detail that John's sure he's going to have nightmares about now. Jack castrated the poor son of a bitch.

Sam's at a loss to explain this deviation in Jack's usual method. "It just doesn't make sense," she says as she paces the length of the conference room, tapping a pen against her bottom lip. "It's not Jack's style."

Probably the third time in half an hour she's said that.

John leans back in his chair, staring at the projection screen with the victim's statistics posted. "There's a connection, somewhere," he says, more to himself than anyone else. "If he was going to go after Bailey's family, why some guy who hasn't been near them in years? Why the school counselor act to get close to Arianna, but never make a move on her? Why get so close to Frannie, and just leave notes and pictures? Why not come after Bailey directly?"

"It's not about Bailey," Rachel's hand is tangled in her hair as she props her head up with an elbow on the table. "It's about the girls. What if..." she falters, eyes flicking back and forth as she thinks.

"What?" Sam stops her pacing. "What if, what?"

"What if he started out planning to do something to Arianna?" Rachel appears to be thinking out loud, and the snap of Bailey's pencil breaking in half doesn't even seem to register. "What if he went in as her school counselor intending to use that position to harm her, but something she did changed his mind? She said that he wasn't pushy, didn't question her about why she was sent to see him. They talked about music the first session, and he offered to schedule her out of her English class for a week if she wanted to continue talking to him."

"A bribe," Sam muses. "Makes himself seem like the nice guy by giving her a choice in coming back."

"But that's not why she agreed to it," Rachel replies certainly. "She liked him."

"She liked him?" Bailey repeats gruffly. "She _liked_ him? That's your explanation?"

"Calm down, Bailey," Sam says off-handedly. "Jack can be charming when it's useful for him."

"It's not about his charm," Rachel sits up straight, looks Bailey in the eye. "You don't want to hear it, but both your daughters were looking for father figures. Jack provided an opportunity for Arianna to talk to an adult, a man, in a safe setting where she was comfortable. First, they talked about music. She says he preferred jazz and blues, and she happened to know most of the artists he mentioned as favorites because _Frances_ taught her about music."

"You think he got to her by reminding her of her sister," Sam realizes, and John's grudgingly interested in the way the two women play off each other, help each other formulate theories. Sam's in better form than he's seen her in since Coop's death, and he's sure the way she and Rachel challenge each other has something to do with it.

"Spend fifteen minutes talking to Arianna, and you'll learn more about Frances than you will about her," Rachel nods. "She idolizes her sister. Her taste in everything-- music, movies, clothing... _everything_ is inherited from what she knows Frances likes. Her interests, her hobbies, they're all things Frances has encouraged her to try or things she knows that Frances approves of."

"Frances is a bigger parental influence to her than Janet is," Bailey sums up, raking a hand through his hair at the realization.

"Exactly," Rachel leans back in her chair and looks at Sam. "You saw the way Arianna talked to Janet the first time we met her. She's sarcastic, she basically ignores any of Janet's attempts to set rules or boundaries. I was just in my office with the two of them and Frannie's friend, and as soon as Frannie told her to do something, she did it. Instantly. No questions, no testing, she obeys."

"And if Frannie told her to lie about something?" John asks. "Something like how they knew the victim?"

Rachel nods silently, looking down.

"But what reason would they possibly have to lie?" George breaks his silence as the projection screen hooked into his laptop starts running columns of data. "I mean, they couldn't have known what Jack was planning. Even if they have suspicions of why he picked this particular victim, it's not like they could have done anything. Why lie about it?"

And that's the sixty-four million dollar question. Silence from the entire room.

Sam frowns suddenly and looks to Rachel. "What else did Arianna talk to Jack about? She told you she was seeing him everyday the first week, and three times a week for four weeks after that. They couldn't have spent all that time talking about music and movies."

"She says they talked about things that bothered her. Boys that flirted with her and then asked out other girls, that kind of thing." The way Rachel says it, it's like she doesn't believe that's entirely true herself. "She glossed over it, but she was very specific about how the last session, she talked about Frances and that's why Jack knew where she was."

"Uh, guys?" George interrupts, raising his eyebrows from the computer screen. "Jack just emailed us."

That gets everybody in the room out of their seats and peering over George's shoulders at the message. "Can you tell where it came from?" Bailey asks, rapid-fire. "Can we trace him to somewhere specific?"

"I'm trying," George's fingers fly over the keyboard as window after window appears on the screen. "Shit. He's routing it through anonymous servers. Russia. Singapore. Hong Kong. We can't use this to find him."

"What does the email say?" Sam asks, waiting for George to bring up the email program again. The message pops up on screen, a single line in all capital letters. _DO I HAVE TO SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU?_ Sam stares at it for a few seconds and shakes her head. "He wants us to know why he did this."

"Bailey," Grace appears in the doorway, grim expression on her face and a small box in her hands. "They just delivered a package from Jack. It's been scanned. No bombs or body parts."

Bailey gestures to her to set the box down, and uses a pocket-knife to open it cautiously. Peers inside, and looks up at the team with furrowed brows as he withdraws a handkerchief and carefully pulls out the contents. "A tape?"

Sam moves forward first, checking the box and then looking at the tape. "There's a VCR in my office."

They relocate silently to Sam's office, the entire team filing in and waiting for her to get the television turned on the tape going. The picture that appears on screen is an ordinary office, the camera mounted behind the man sitting at the desk, facing the door. The cop in John notes the details like the light filtering through the window (mid-afternoon, probably) and the posters on the wall. A soft knock, and Arianna Malone appears.

"I hate English," she sighs melodramatically as she drops herself into the chair in front of the desk. "Can you, like, write me a note saying I'm emotionally disturbed and can't be expected to write a clear essay on the underlying themes of _The Giver_."

"No," the man behind the desk, _Jack_, says with what sounds like amusement. "And as an official of the school, I'm also not going to suggest you ask your sister for help."

"She's so much better at this stuff than me," Arianna sighs. "It's not fair."

"Ah, but you have areas you're better at than she is, don't you?" Jack asks, the same low, gravelly voice that taunts them with his murders. "Didn't you tell me that you used to do her math homework when she was in high school?"

"Math's easy," Arianna shrugs. "Every problem has an answer. You just have to figure it out."

"If life were that easy, you wouldn't have to come see me."

"I like seeing you," Arianna gives a soft smile. "You're like my Bobby."

"Bobby is your sister's friend?"

John suspects Jack planned all along to send this tape to Bailey, and that's why he's dropping hints about previous conversations. Bailey looks like he's about ready to attempt jumping through the screen to strangle Jack with his bare hands.

Arianna nods, pulling her feet up to sit Indian-style in the chair. "Bobby takes care of Sasha. Ever since he found out-- he's always there, whenever she needs him. I talked to him when I called her last week 'cause they're in Miami. Any time she needs him, she just has to call and he'll drop _everything_ to be there for her."

"You don't think he'd do the same for you?"

"Oh, he would," Arianna says hastily. "But it's not really the same. I'm like, the little sister, right? And Sasha's like his partner. When he was dating our mom, he and Sasha hung out whenever he stayed over, and they got to be really good friends."

"And you were never suspicious of his interest in her?"

Jack's guiding the conversation toward something, John realizes abruptly. Arianna picks a Rubik's cube off his desk and begins playing with it, carefully avoiding looking at anything else. "I was, at first. I'm suspicious of any of them that pay attention to her like that."

"Them?"

"Mom's boyfriends," Arianna clarifies. "But then Sasha told me that Bobby knew, and we could trust him."

"Bobby knew what?"

"About what happened."

She's being deliberately vague, and John looks at first Sam, then Rachel to gauge their reactions. Sam's focused intently on the video, but Rachel... Rachel looks like she's beginning to suspect something. Jack begins rather gently, "If you don't want to talk about it--"

"No, I'm good," Arianna flashes a bright, clearly fake smile, and she looks exactly like Frannie in that second.

Silence for a few long seconds, and Jack says, "It's okay to still be upset about it, Arianna."

"It's not like it happened to me," she shrugs, obviously uncomfortable, but there's something in her expression that says she wants to talk. "Sasha's over it. I should be, too."

"Your sister has had her friend, Bobby, to talk to. Have you talked to anyone about it?"

"You."

"Yes, but you don't go into detail," Jack presses, and John's getting a terrible feeling about where this is going. "Have you ever sat down with someone and just told them the entire story, to get it off your chest?"

"No." Arianna's silent, hands still on the Rubik's cube. Finally, she asks, unsure, "Can I tell you?"

"Of course."

Arianna nods a few times. Swallows hard. Looks all around the room, and the camera's focused enough to see that she's trying to blink back tears. "I was eight," she starts quietly, and in his peripheral vision, John sees Rachel's knees cave out from under her as she drops to the couch, and he knows she _knows_ exactly what Arianna's going to say. "Mom started dating this guy. Nothing new. She dates a ton of guys, right? But this one, he gave me a bad feeling, in my stomach, like when I'm sick."

Sam sits down next to Rachel abruptly.

"I--Sasha didn't like him either, and she wouldn't leave me alone while he was there," Arianna's hands are shaking on the Rubik's cube, and she finally drops it back on the desk, folding her hands in her lap. "But Carrie Harper invited me to her sleepover birthday party, and Mom made me go 'cause Carrie's mom was her friend. The next night--"

Arianna stops abruptly, and Jack tells her, "Take your time."

She nods rapidly, blinking a few times. "Sasha told me we were going to play a game. She gave me her walkman-- that was a _big_ deal 'cause I broke her stereo on accident and I wasn't supposed to touch her stuff after that. But she put the headphones on my ears and told me to listen to the whole tape, and she told me I was going to hide in the crawlspace until she came to get me, 'cause Mom said I wasn't allowed to listen to the tape she was giving me."

Pausing, Arianna's twists the ring on her finger and looks at the corner of Jack's desk studiously. "I was about two songs in, and the batteries died," she laughs, and the sound is far too bitter and sad for a thirteen year old. "I went to find her, and... And... He was..."

"It's okay," Jack urges her. "You can say it."

"He was raping her."

"Christ," Bailey shakes his head, leaning heavily against Sam's desk. "Jesus Christ."

"Your mother's boyfriend?" Jack asks calmly. "The one who gave you a bad feeling?"

"Yeah." Tears are sliding down Arianna's cheeks, and she swipes at them half-heartedly. "I--God. I turned around and went back and hid in the crawlspace. I should've done something, screamed or called 911 or woke Mom up, but I just left her there. He hurt her and I just left her there!" Arianna's clearly disgusted with herself over this, and she shakes her head, looking up. "Every time he stayed over, two, three times a week, he hurt--he raped her, and every time I let her hide me. I never said anything. For months, I just let it happen."

Jack nods. Moves around the desk to sit on the corner, careful to never give the camera an angle that could be used to identify him, and lets Arianna cry into her hands. "I want you to listen to me very carefully now, Arianna. You were eight years old. It wasn't your job to protect your sister, it was your mother's and your father's. They both failed you, and your sister. It's _their_ fault, not yours."

"But if I'd said something--"

"What do you think your mother's reaction would have been?"

"If _I_ said something?" Arianna's emphasis there doesn't go unnoticed. "I don't know. She was always on Sasha about wearing clothes that were slutty, according to her. I think she accused Sasha of trying to get one of her boyfriends' attention a couple months before. She might have just said we were making it up 'cause we didn't like Vince--"

And John shakes his head. There's the connection.

"--and we were still pissed about the divorce," Arianna swipes her thumb under her eye, brushing away tears. "Yeah, Sash was probably still pissed about it 'cause she lost a dad. I was three when they divorced. I don't even remember the guy, really. How could I be pissed about losing somebody I don't know?"

Bailey flinches, and Sam reaches a hand out to rest comfortingly on his shoulder.

"This Vince," Jack begins. "What's his full name?"

Arianna looks exactly like a younger Frannie as she asks suspiciously, "Why? You said you wouldn't tell."

"I have no intention of breaking my word to you," Jack assures her. "But I'd like to look into this man and make sure he isn't able to hurt any other young girls."

It takes a few seconds of looking Jack straight in the eye, but Arianna caves. "Vincent Salvatori."

"You can rest assured he'll never hurt your sister again."

The tape cuts out suddenly, even though it's clearly not the end of the discussion, and everybody in the room jumps at the hiss of static on the television. Bailey leaves abruptly, slamming out of the room, and Sam takes just seconds to follow him out. Grace and George leave for the solitude of their respected spaces, probably, and by the time John looks back at Rachel, she has a hand pressed over her mouth. It takes him a second to realize that she's crying. "Hey," he says softly as he sits next to her, wraps a comforting arm around her shoulders, and she stuns him by turning into his embrace. "Shh," he tries to soothe as he holds her, and it's harder than it should be considering that he's seen her naked and begging him not to stop. His first impulse is to say that it'll be okay, but he doesn't. Instead, he just murmurs again, "Shh."

"Jesus, John, she's just a kid," Rachel's voice is low and husky with tears, muffled slightly since she's speaking into his shirt collar. "She's just a little kid, and she's been blaming herself for years."

"I know," John strokes her hair, more for something to do with his hands than anything else. "I know."

It takes Rachel just a few minutes to pull herself back together, and she quietly says, "Thanks." He just nods and gives her a half-smile, and she tells him, "We should go talk to her. And Frannie. Now we know why they were lying."

  
*

  
"We weren't lying," Arianna insists, arms folded over her chest defensively as she stands in front of her sister in a protective stance. Frannie's leaning against the conference table with her friend at her side, massaging her temples with her eyes closed like she thinks she can block them all out and the whole situation will just go away. All righteous indignation, Arianna continues, "How dare you say that! I want to talk to Rachel!"

Clearly, John has made the list of people Arianna doesn't like.

"Arianna," Frannie's tone is a clear warning, and Arianna instantly falls silent. Bailey and Sam exchange meaningful glances at the display. "Go find Rachel and see if she'll take you out for lunch. And get something that's reasonably close to the definition of nutritional."

Arianna looks like she wants to argue, but bites her lip and nods, closing the door behind herself. Bailey is staring at Frannie like he can't quite believe she's finally back in the same room with him, and it's probably the first time John's ever seen the older man hesitate. "Frances, we know Vincent Salvatori abused you."

The ensuing confrontation redefines the phrase 'worst case scenario' in John's mind.

Frannie reacts to them knowing the truth about as well as a cat locked in a room full of dogs. She lashes out at them all, blames Bailey for the whole thing because he abandoned them, blames Sam for being a shitty profiler who can't even catch her husband's murderer, and tops it off by blaming John for not leaving her alone after he slept with her.

He has no doubt she could probably do even more damage if her friend wasn't sliding an arm around her waist, talking to her in a voice so quiet none of them can hear. Frannie looks up at her friend, nods once, turns on her heel, and flees. John instinctively starts after her, but her friend steps in front of the doorway, blocking him. "Let her go," the man says calmly, and it grates on John's nerves.

"Jack's still out there," John growls back at him. "She's still in danger."

"She's not going to be alone." The man pauses, rakes a hand through his hair, and adds, "Look, she's pissed off and she's hurt. You go after her, she's going to hurt back. And if you think what she did just now was bad? You _really_ don't want to know what she's capable of when her back's against the wall."

"John, back off," Bailey orders tiredly. "If we push any more, she'll run again."

The 'I can't lose her like that again' doesn't have to be said.

Something in the man's expression softens, and he says, "She's tougher than she looks. She'll get through it."

Having said that, the man leaves to follow Frannie, and Bailey scrubs his hands over his face as he sits down. Sam takes the seat next to him, studying him, and Bailey finally looks up at John. "Were you planning on telling me you slept with my eighteen year old daughter?"


	7. I've been wandering, feeling all alone. I lost my direction and I lost my home.

She only drinks tequila when things are _really_ fucking bad.

And she's already been through four shots. That should say something about her state of mind.

"Slow down," Bobby orders as he shakes his head at the bartender trying to pour her a fifth shot. The bartender retreats to the other side of the bar, and Bobby guides her off her barstool toward a booth in the back. "The last time you went through shots this fast, you threw up on my shoes."

"Oh, thanks for that wonderful memory," she rolls her eyes as she scoots across the vinyl so he can slide in next to her. The lighting at the bar is dim, but comparatively, the booth lighting is nonexistant. "You're going to keep bringing that up for the rest of my life, aren't you?"

"Well, they were really nice shoes."

"Could you possibly sound more like a girl?"

"Only if I mention how they matched my purse," Bobby grins at her, and she can't help smiling back at him when he gives her that look. Sighing, she rests her head on his shoulder as the liquor starts to kick in and make everything floaty. She idly wonders if 'floaty' is even a word before deciding it doesn't matter; she's entitled to make up her own words if she can't find any she likes, right? "Baby, you know you can't run away from this forever."

"Mmm, not now." Okay, that was definitely whining. Another reason she doesn't drink tequila often, she now remembers. "I don't want to do this now. I just want to get really, really drunk and forget about... _everything_."

"No offense, Sash, but the last time you got really, really drunk--"

"I know, your shoes."

"Well, those, too. But I was talking about that night at the Straights when you decided we needed to sleep together."

Groaning, she slumps forward and lays her head on the table. "Oh, god, you swore you weren't going to bring that up ever again."

"I lied." Bobby's getting way too much enjoyment out of this. "You know, you did make a pretty convincing argument despite how drunk you were. And hey, the whole 'naked friends' thing _was_ pretty appealing..."

"Ha fucking ha," she says sarcastically. "You should be so lucky."

"Another five minutes and I would've been," he teases. Then he turns serious, reaches out and runs his fingers through the hair at her temple, looking at her sympathetically. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know," she looks across the bar and exhales slowly, shaking her head just slightly. They sit in amiable silence for a little while, and she says quietly, "I need to get out of here. Let's just skip the whole 'dealing with things instead of repressing' lecture for now, okay? I just... I really can't do this right now."

Bobby just looks at her for a long moment. "Okay. Where do you want to go?"

"New York," she murmurs, shifting her gaze to meet his. "We're going to need an interim manager at Inferno, anyway."

"Sara's not working out?"

"Sara's pregnant. She's going to request maternity leave in a couple months."

He rubs his chin, nodding. "You know they'll find you there."

"Probably," she agrees, idly playing with the salt packets in the middle of the table. "But I'll have the home-court advantage there. I hate this god damn city almost as much as I hate Baltimore." Glances at him and asks, "Can you take care of things for me?"

"Of course," Bobby wraps an around her shoulders and hugs her close. "I'll handle everything."

  
*

  
The flight attendant asks if she'd like another Mimosa, and Sasha O'Dell smiles a yes.

In less than an hour, she'll land at JFK International Airport, where a limo will be waiting to take her to Bobby's Manhattan penthouse. She'll be greeted warmly by the staff, asked how her trip was, and probably, be given the latest earnings reports and copies of the books for the club.

She won't, however, have to deal with anybody looking at her with _pity_.

And really, that's all that matters to her at the moment.


End file.
